Trapped in abeyance by circumstances beyond his control, Stephen Bayley can’t stand the suspense

When he wrote a play about barely tolerable tedium, Samuel Beckett put “waiting” in the title. But Waiting for Godot also concerns – not just sitting about – but notions of anxiety, futility, apprehension, suppressed panic and dread. Beckett’s masterpiece is a bravura demo of spiritual fear and cosmic doubt.

If it seems incongruous that a member of the Idler community should so hate waiting because it suggests impatience and an unbecoming sense of urgency, stratagems to avoid delay, that is to misunderstand what waiting is really about. Waiting is truly disturbing and sinister. Waiting is not value-free sloth (which I enjoy), but panicky entrapment. I am perfectly capable of doing nothing of my own accord. I do it quite well and often. But waiting requires you to do nothing by someone else’s rules. And this surrender of personal authority is what is so hateful about it.

Everything with “waiting” attached to it is uncomfortable. A doctor’s waiting room. Even worse, waiting for the results from tests possibly made on a visit there. Waiting for boarding at an airport. Waiting for a sluggish web page to load. Waiting for the kettle to boil. Waiting to be seated in a restaurant. Waiting for a bus. Waiting for the Crack of Doom. Waiting for an explanation. One which will never come.

Or take waiting for guests to arrive. This is surely the most perverse of torments, an invention of Satan. You have decided the menu, looking forward to seeing greedy friends. Been to Waitrose to get the ingredients. Spent half an afternoon prepping, slicing.

In the oven, good to go. And it gets to six. They are not expected until seven-thirty. You have already laid the table, uncorked the Primitivo. Too soon for a drink yourself? Probably. So you are suspended in a limbo defined by completion at one end and expectation on the other. In the interim, a waiting horror of nothingness. Literally, you are stuck. Waiting…

Waiting triggers the brain’s stress responses. It is not a nerveless stasis, but imposed inactivity which is electric with anxiety. I have been on a plane which very nearly crashed, but nothing has made me so urgently frightened as being on an 88 bus in Whitehall, stalled in traffic, waiting, waiting, waiting for the temporary traffic lights to give permission to proceed.

Being made to wait suggests someone else is in charge. This applies especially in restaurants. Instead of strolling in and saying, or rather thinking, “Hey, here I am about to spend a lot of money – please let me sit down immediately and buy some mediocre food and over-priced wine”, what actually happens is that a gobby lickspittle who has total control of your evening will eventually, when it pleases her, direct you to a table.

I don’t ever want to wait, I want to proceed. Even thinking about waiting gives me shudders.

I was a day boy in a Northern grammar school, so lived in my parents’ house until I went to university. A childhood memory which I can still recall with a thrill of tearful horror was, aged 12, say – by 14 I was diverted by girls and beer – waiting to hear my father’s car approach after one of his many evenings out. He said they were business meetings, but now I suspect they may have been of a more personal nature. No matter. Until I heard the scrunch of the Humber on gravel, I could not sleep, suspended in an uncomfortable hammock of fear and doubt, churning this way and that, unable to think of anything other than the resolution of a car door being shut.

This fear still recurs when I’m waiting for my wife to come home from an innocent trip to the supermarket. She will not have given me an ETA because her time is her own and she enjoys many diversions. But I will – entirely unaided – have determined the correct time for her return. If this imaginary deadline is exceeded, I walk the corridors, check my watch, roll up the blinds and look out, listen for police sirens. I will fail to concentrate on anything else. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

It’s like the anticipation of the flashing “Now boarding” sign. Of course, she comes home with a bunch of peonies, some Rummo pasta, unwaxed lemons and Nespresso pellets. And the dread of waiting suddenly evaporates into gratitude and disbelief.

But waiting itself cannot be so easily dispatched. Waiting takes time. Waiting sucks up time. The Kinks and Tom Petty wrote songs with waiting as a repetitive motif. A susceptibility to waiting and its attendant horrors is, I am sure, never going to leave me.

I have seen research which says Americans spend more than 37 billion hours a year waiting. Sometimes I think I have spent more… but wait. They say everything comes to him who waits. Yes. Anxiety, futility, apprehension, suppressed panic and dread.

I am waiting for waiting to be at an end.

This article is from the August-September 2026 issue of the Idler (#111) – out now.

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