QUEUING
Daily Telegraph - February 2008

THE proposal this week by a British minister to issue information packs to new migrants teaching them how to queue prompted in me mixed emotions.
On the one hand I sympathise -- one rush hour at Central Station and I'm ready to skip the pamphlets and head straight to the police state. On the other, I feel that I can't in good conscience lecture anybody else about crimes of which I am guilty.

It has taken me three visits to the UK to realise that I am a bad queuer.

Picture the scene: a butcher's shop in London last year. The butcher appears from the back room; a silence, so I give my order. What followed was a wave of tight-lipped indignation that swept across the room like a cold wind up my shorts.

Admittedly, I had noticed the pair of ragged, stony-faced matriarchs standing one-behind-the-other in the corner, but they were huddled together so timidly and at such a respectful distance from the counter I immediately assumed they were either waiting for their already filled orders or were homeless and hoping to spend the night.

It had never occurred to me that a queue could consist of only two people. I mean: how hard could it be to work out who was next? Was this a queue or a mini conga line?

What bothered me most about the whole affair is that, this being the UK, no one simply said, “Hey, I was next.” Instead they made mute, wounded faces, allowed me to be served, then went home, nursing their outrage, stewing on it and fattening it into a fully-grown grievance that they could share at dinner parties and church fetes before summoning their last ounce of strength to lean up from their death beds and whisper into the ear of a priest: “I was next.”

It's not that Australians don't queue, but our commitment seems half-hearted at best; more a form of competitive loitering, with seemingly random exceptions made for certain bus routes and theme parks. Of all the things we've inherited from the English, queuing languishes somewhere with HP Sauce and decent television.

Is this lack of queuing a recent phenomenon or a product of my own imagination and bad manners? Have we lost the art? Is it, perhaps, that our egalitarian values abhor a queue?

Perhaps we should ask whether queuing even matters. After all, most of the world seems to do well enough without it and we seem to be edging ever-closer to a state of total queue-lessness.

Would abolishing the queue be out of line?

© Brendan Shanahan 2008