Time For Action? This Is Our Queue

The British talent for waiting in line could come in handy now social-distancing habits are the new normal

- Martin Phillips

If ever a crisis played to our national strengths, then surely it is the one we are in now. That’s right. Your Country Needs You… to form an orderly queue. All those years of lining up politely for buses, bank tellers and train tickets were the perfect training.

All those hours waiting to get into major sporting events and showbiz concerts were ideal preparation for the time we now must spend (when not safely at home) queueing two metres apart, outside, on essential shopping trips to the supermarket, the pharmacy or the post office.

Suddenly there is a new shopping etiquette; store staff man shop entrances armed with sanitising spray for your trolleys and baskets, and there is a new phone app to let you view your local supermarket’s stocks and queue lengths.

And most of us will embrace it and feel comforted by the lines of stripey tape that appeared, overnight, on the floors of our local grocery stores, won’t we? Because queueing is apparently what we British do better than most.

As far back as 1944, in his essay The English People, George Orwell imagined how a foreign observer would be struck by an English crowd’s “willingness to form queues”.

Hungarian-born British author George Mikes, in his 1946 book How To Be An Alien, wrote: “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”