I'm all for delayed gratification. I will book theatre tickets six months ahead. I will take a shoulder of lamb, stud it with anchovies and garlic and half-submerge it in a broth of red wine, stock and piggy bits, so that it looks like the ravaged island of Dr Moreau, shove it in the oven and know it will have nothing of any interest to say to me for at least seven hours.

What I won't do is queue for a hamburger. In this, it seems, I am peculiar. Recently London's Covent Garden has seen the opening of the US operations Shake Shack and Five Guys. We also have home-grown outfits like Meat Liquor, and Burger and Lobster, which seem to regard reservation policies as bourgeois affectations. In the sense that bookable tables suit people with jobs, interesting lives and places they need to be which don't include standing dead-eyed and wet-lipped on a chilly pavement for the running time of The Godfather Part III, I suppose they are. And yes, it's not entirely new. The Hard Rock Cafe has long been famous for its queue, but that was so odd it was a tourist attraction, something people pointed and laughed at. The new queueing has got completely out of hand. It's taken for granted. I have wandered past these places on numerous occasions and been baffled. What in God's name possesses anyone to stand in an endless line – I've been quoted more than two hours for Burger and Lobster – for a lump of ground beef between two sugary buns?

Of course it's not just a lump of ground beef, is it? Over at the Shake Shack it's "our proprietary Shack blend" which makes it sound less like lunch and more like a haemorrhoid ointment; at Five Guys it's "hand formed burgers cooked to perfection". Really? Whose version of perfection, given that Westminster Council is trying to outlaw any burger served less than medium? Or completely buggered, as it's known.

I'll go that extra 10 miles to eat well. I'll cross London to secure an ingredient, take a flight to eat at the right restaurant. But queue? That's not an expression of greed. It's stamp-collecting. It's trainspotting. It's eating out as spectator sport. Except the only thing the queue has to spectate upon is itself, and there it finds validation: standing in line for a hamburger must be entirely reasonable; just look at all the other people doing it.

The counter-argument involves the P word: patience, and my total lack of it. Apparently patience is a virtue. Really? If everybody was patient, nothing would ever get done. The world depends on restless, impatient people. I should also point out that patience is one of the seven great Christian virtues. Nobody with an appetite should ever sign up to those. Obviously some are OK. I believe fully in humility. I am brilliant at that, do it better than anybody else. But chastity and temperance? Don't be silly. That's the point. Queuing for a burger is not about eating. It's about self-denial. And doing the restaurant's marketing for them by standing outside.

Me? I will go somewhere that serves a slightly less impressive burger and in so doing, trade a little of the perceived quality of the Shake Shack object of desire, for living more of my life. I've only got one of those, and I'm not wasting it in a queue.

(theguardian.com)

ANN.Az