I suffer from queue dyslexia the affliction that makes it impossible to predict the shortest checkout queue. I also often underestimate the time it takes to do a "quick shop" on the way to picking up the children from school.

The vision of the little mites languishing, apparently unloved, by the school gate looms ever closer as checkout inertia syndrome rears its ugly head.

Simple prediction methods, like assessing the quantity of articles in trolleys and number of people in the queue are doomed to failure.

The moment I attach myself to the rear of what appears to be a short line, the people in front of me drop bottles of wine, lose their wallets, need to take their child to the lavatory or discover that the checkout girl is their long-lost second cousin.

Then the checkout girl reaches for the dreaded bell. As soon as you hear that bell ring, you know that you should have brought a good book with you. And it does not ring just once.

In a supermarket the size of the average football ground the designated bell responder may be, as it were, in the opponents' goalmouth showing a bemused shopper where the batteries are this week.

I am sure they keep moving stuff around to ensure that we can't just go and get what we actually want, but have to scan shelves carefully, thereby exposing us to the distinct possibility of being tempted to purchase things we didn't know we wanted.

When the checkout bell tolls, you must resist the temptation to switch queues. Bitter experience has taught that the blight travels with you to the new till. Just stand there and take your medicine.

I once had to leave my trolley in the care of a sympathetic supervisor to go and collect my children from school before returning an hour later.

And, of course, being English, I meekly joined the back of another queue rather than make any attempt to elicit unlikely sympathy for my previous frustration from the new batch of shuffling shoppers.

Post offices and banks have moved, at last, into the single queue feeder system, but even then I find that a formerly swiftly moving queue grinds suddenly to a halt soon after I join it.

You can tell you're in trouble when a teller starts to look perplexed and goes to fetch a colleague, who is similarly challenged by whatever mysterious challenge has been passed through the metal airlock under the reinforced glass.

Not that I have tried terribly hard, but I have never been able to occupy more than 20 seconds of a teller's time. I can feel the scorn of my fellow customers, as I creep away with my apparently very dull business completed.

I was delighted to read that the Chinese have solved the queuing problem when getting hordes of travellers into aeroplane seats.

In the civilised (so-called) west, there is a half-hearted attempt to board by seat numbers, but the end result is the same old baggage-lugging battle up the inadequate aisle space, only to find your overhead locker is already full.

In China the passengers are lined up on the tarmac to stand on numbered painted squares corresponding to their seats. When all are present, the line enters the plane in the correct order.

However school playground-ish that might seem, it's preferable to the current scrum.