"Waiting is a place, it is wherever you wait", muses Offred in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but as one of the world's most impatient people I have never really discerned much virtue in waiting. This inevitably means I miss buses while walking to the next stop and eat most of my dinner before it's prepared.
I'm therefore fascinated by the work of Jane Miller, who has made waiting into an art in her latest project, located deep in the forests of North America. In the absence of hoped-for sightings of Bigfoot, visitors to a Norwich gallery are treated to images of the artist, well … waiting.
Appropriately enough, the theatre's most famous study in inactivity, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, celebrates the 50th anniversary of its British premiere this very evening. Beckett himself has long passed through to the great waiting room in the sky, so how else might we celebrate the art of quiescence?
Surely the only thing to do is take refuge in the one activity beloved of anyone with not quite enough to do - a speculative Google search. Early on it throws up thewaitinggame.com, which takes an age to load - some kind of existential joke? - but also countless results on the theme of waiting: Christopher Guest's 1996 movie Waiting for Guffman, The Waiting Game by Welsh writer Bernice Rubens and the faintly derivative (but most un-Beckettian) Waiting For Bob, a comic strip that seems to have been waiting so long it's actually died.
But the richest seam in this particular mine seems to be in woebegone pop tracks: Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx, Waiting For a Girl Like You by Foreigner and more recently Gwen Stefani's What You Waiting For?. Some legendary names do crop up - Diana Ross and Bob Marley both wrote songs called I'm Still Waiting - but finest moments these aren't. Anyone for You Can't Hurry Love (You Just Have to Wait)? Performed by Phil Collins?
