Not intending to take the blame off these illiterate students, may I remind you of my observation of my trip to London in April this year when on a tube a station officer had to address the crowd eager to get on the train that they’d have less trouble getting in, if they let others get off first. I can assure you, and you may very well guess yourself, not all of those who were behaving improperly were students, let alone foreign. I have seen a few examples of such disorderly queuing in Manchester. On the other hand, it is always very nice when a guy in a hoodie offers all women at the bus stop to get on the bus before him.
For my part, I’ve always queued, when and where it was necessary. Even when there is no queue-like chain of people but a few individuals wandering around, I still usually ask if any of them is queuing up. At the very least, it saves having an argument.
Anyway, what was interesting about Yahoo! article is this passage:
Orderly queuing — as seen during the recent Northern Rock banking crisis — is seen as a quintessentially British convention. One social anthropologist believes Britons are even capable of forming one-person queues at bus stops.
Hang on a second, I thought, I have read this before, and surely it wasn’t an academic study. You see, many years ago when I was preparing for my entrance exams to the University, I wanted to hone my translation skills from English into Russian while reading something entertaining. This is how I came across and fell in love with George Mikes’s How to be an Alien. As a matter of fact, last year’s seen 60 years since the book was first published.
A chapter called A National Passion is dedicated to the art of queuing, and, like with many other chapters, the observations are pretty much valid until this day. As Mikes said in the preface to his book, he expected a scandal to happen, but instead was showered with much praise. I highlighted the phrase that Yahoo! article seemingly alludes to. It is still possible of course that a social anthropologist could use this phrase in their study, but it looks like Mikes is our primary source for such comparison.
Queueing is the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race.
The English are rather shy about it, and deny that they adore it.
On the Continent, if people are waiting at a bus-stop they loiter
around in a seemingly vague fashion. When the bus arrives they make a dash
for it; most of them leave by the bus and a lucky minority is taken away by
an elegant black ambulance car. An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an
orderly queue of one.
The biggest and most attractive advertisements in front of cinemas tell
people: Queue here for 4s 6d; Queue here for 9s 3d; Queue here for 16s 8d
(inclusive of tax). Those cinemas which do not put out these queueing signs
do not do good business at all.
At week-ends an Englishman queues up at the bus-stop, travels out to
Richmond, queues up for a boat, then queues up for tea, then queues up for
ice cream, then joins a few more odd queues just for the sake of the fun of
it, then queues up at the bus-stop and has the time of his life.
Many English families spend lovely evenings at home just by queueing up
for a few hours, and the parents are very sad when the children leave them
and queue up for going to bed.
