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A short treatise on standing in line

Every country is said to have a national pastime, and it is a mark of how thoroughly we misunderstand ourselves that ours is usually given as a sport or the weather, when it is plainly the queue. Nobody has ever been taught to queue. We absorb the skill in childhood, as we absorb a regional accent, and we practise it with the unconscious devotion of a people who have never been asked to justify it.

Consider the structure of the thing. A queue is a society in miniature, with a constitution that nobody has written and everybody can recite. The first principle is that arrival confers rights: the one who came first shall be served first, and no argument, however ingenious, about the urgency of one's errand will be entertained. The second is that all grievances must be expressed through the sideways glance, the sigh pitched just below the level of speech, and the shifting of weight from one foot to the other. Open complaint is regarded as a failure of character.

The queue-jumper, naturally, is the villain of the piece, and nothing reveals the delicacy of the system like the manner in which he is dealt with. He is not confronted. He is not even, strictly speaking, noticed. Instead, a faint chill descends upon the surrounding air, and a small chorus of people who are all studying the ceiling with unusual attention conveys to him, more eloquently than any speech, that he has been entered in a ledger from which he will not easily be removed.

I have lately begun to suspect that this is a more efficient form of justice than any court provides. It is swift, it is free, and it requires no evidence beyond the shared conviction of thirty strangers. Its only defect is that the offender frequently fails to understand that he has been sentenced, and goes on to buy his stamps in perfect contentment, unaware that he has been condemned to a lifetime of disapproval on the part of the woman standing behind him.

There is, of course, a darker side. A people that finds it easier to suffer in silence than to say, "Excuse me, I believe I was next," has, one might argue, surrendered something precious. I once watched a man wait forty minutes in the wrong queue rather than ask anyone whether it was the right one. His patience was admirable. His destination, regrettably, was a different counter in a different building.

The modern age has attempted to abolish the queue by means of the ticket machine, the app and the virtual waiting room, all of which promise that one may stand in line without standing at all. I wish them well, but I am sceptical. A queue that cannot be seen cannot be policed, and a queue that cannot be policed is merely a list. Within a week of the introduction of the new system at my local post office, I noticed that people had begun to form, quite spontaneously, a second queue of those waiting to use the machine.

That seems to me a hopeful sign. We may lose our patience, our small change and, eventually, our post offices, but we shall never entirely lose the instinct to stand behind one another and mind our own business loudly. If civilisation does fall, I imagine that the first sound of its recovery will be a small, dry cough, followed by the words: "I think you will find that is the end of the line."