In today’s Canberra Times there is an article about the prospect faced by Canberrans of the need to queue for tickets to popular events such as hockey matches. This is apparently an unusual feature of life in Canberra, a city that is small enough to avoid the need for queueing, a phenomenon which the writer of the article (Ian Warden) says is more typical of England:
Perhaps because of my English working-class background, I have always had a fondness, an aptitude, even a genius for queuing. Traditionally the English are accomplished, virtuoso queuers. In one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels there are docile working-class Londoners who go out looking for queues to join, never asking what it is they are queueing for.
Warden must be thinking of Waugh’s novel Unconditional Surrender which begins with the description of a queue that has formed outside Westminster Abbey to view a sword that will be presented to the Soviet Union in gratitude for their help in winning WWII:
The people of England were long habituated to queues; some had joined the procession ignorant of its end–hoping perhaps for cigarettes or shoes–but most were in a mood of devotion…Already the police were turning away the extremity of the queue saying:”You won’t get in today. Come back tomorrow morning–early,” and the people obediently drifted into the dusk to join other queues elsewhere (Unconditional Surender, New York, 2012, pp. 15-16, 31).
