Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime
By Joe Moran
Profile Books £14.99, 288 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

Georges Perec, the French author and student of the everyday, invented a wonderful term: l’infra-ordinaire, the infra-ordinary. He complained that the papers were full of stories of disaster, of drama, of the extraordinary. Yet what interested him was the minutiae of everyday existence, the little rituals we follow without even noticing, the clutter on our desks which reveals more about us than the most comprehensive biography.

Perec was writing from a French tradition of philosophical interest in the quotidian. There were the proto-surreal, fin-de-siecle photos of a ragged Paris by Eugene Atget. There were the Parisian Situationists who walked around the 1960s city in unplanned drift, so that avenues planned for marching armies were bypassed in favour of alleys and backstreet bars. There was Perec’s own beautiful Species of Spaces, and Michel de Certeau’s lyrical The Practice of Everyday Life. The field of finding beauty in the ordinary was quintessentially Parisian.

Joe Moran has made a number of stabs at an English version of le quotidien, but he has run up against a problem: English empiricism is extremely ill-suited to the study of the everyday. Both Queuing for Beginners and Moran’s previous work, Reading the Everyday, attempt an anglicised version of that Parisian world, but in true English style he has produced an admirably comprehensive and well-researched series of studies of everything from the fag break to the rush hour, but has forgotten to find the lyricism. Without finding its beauty, the everyday remains, well, everyday.

Moran’s approach is broadly sociological, a kind of popular anthropology. Where he is best is on the rituals of office life, the development of furniture and communication, the exclusion of smokers, as if there is so little lyricism in these parts of our lives that he is on firm ground.

His chapter on the rise of the sofa is a fine piece of social history, but there is just not enough reminiscent of the poetry that first convinced us of the lyricism of the ordinary.

At one point, Moran quotes the German architect and philosopher Siegfried Kracauer: “Hundreds of thousands of salaried employees throng the streets of Berlin daily, yet their life is more unknown than that of the primitive tribes at whose habits those same employees marvel in films.” Those same employees would now be watching reality TV, the banal made into culture of the worst possible kind. Maybe the study of the ordinary has been damaged, but perhaps its beauty just needs to be rediscovered.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture writer