The British have always loved queueing – or so it’s said. Perhaps ‘tolerated’ or ‘put up with’ would be a better description, and closer to our national habit of submitting to authority and enduring hardship with nothing more than subdued and bitter grumbling.
But now we have The Queue. The Platonic Queue. A Queue that is quintessentially British, one that has even beaten a dastardly Russian rival to make it into the Guinness Book of Records. An entity in its own right, grown from a short tailback outside Westminster Hall to a five-mile, 12-hour feat of endurance.
The Queue has its own fan club, its own Tracker, and a whole industry has sprung up to service it. Portaloos have appeared, street entertainers and musicians help to keep up morale, food sellers hawk their goods down its length, and an army of volunteer medics, priests and counsellors cater to its physical and mental welfare. There’s even a livestream to help fascinated viewers watch the slow and shuffling progress of The Queue from afar.
Twitterati on The Queue
Apart from being a gift to a media struggling to fill the airwaves with increasingly banal vox pops, The Queue has also inspired the twitterati. They are their very best, sparkling with wit and building increasingly fantastical narratives around this extraordinary entity. @ICT_MrP tweets: “I think we need to recognise the unsung heroes of #TheQueue. Because we all know that a spectacle of this scale is only possible due to the hard work and dedication of primary school teachers who taught these people the true art of lining up sensibly.” @allontheboard suggests that Southwark Park should be renamed Queue Gardens. Threads are dedicated to the story of the tomato sandwich featured on BBC TV (“I hope it was made with good British tomatoes”) and the two sisters who brought their husbands along to join in the fun. Unremarkable until you learn that both husbands were present in the form of ashes contained in tin boxes.
Why Queue?
All this is very, very British of course. And it does lead many of us who are not contributing to The Queue to wonder – WHY? Why would thousands of people choose to endure over twelve hours of gruelling, slow shuffling in the cold and the wet, to eventually reach their goal – a few seconds’ view of Queen Elizabeth II’s flag-draped coffin standing on its catafalque in Westminster Hall?
Perhaps it’s because The Queue is not just any old queue. It embodies very different virtues, and its attractions are those of community, kinship, patience and togetherness in adversity – an opportunity for the good old British ‘Blitz spirit’ to emerge once again. It contrasts with the sharp-elbowed tussle of the January Sales queue, or, as one twitter poster expressed it, the dull-eyed motorised queues at Dover, seething and frustrated. It reflects the sense of the community coming together that was apparent for a while during lockdown, and the more recent generous-spirited opening of homes to Ukrainian refugees.
The values embodied by The Queue contrast with those of the ‘common-or-garden’ or Darwinian queue: devil-take-the-hindmost, ‘get there first’, the survival of the fittest. The virtues of The Queue are the virtues that many have associated with the late Queen, in sharp contrast to those qualities often attributed to our politicians. The Darwinian queue for them. THE Queue for our late monarch.
Community in The Queue
There is also a certain poignancy in the way that people speak of their experience of The Queue. They talk about complete strangers becoming close friends over the course of 12 hours; of sharing meals with those who brought no food with them; of the feeling of close community that they experienced, being in a crowd of like-minded people. They swopped anecdotes of meeting the late Queen in which the briefest of interactions obviously held a real magic for many of them: “She asked me what I did and looked straight at me”, as one woman told a media interviewer with awe. It’s as though there’s an enormous well out there in our country of untapped desire to feel part of a close community, to build friendships, to be recognised and appreciated, to focus on what binds us together rather than what drives us apart.
Labels are discarded in The Queue – ‘Remainer’ and ‘Brexiter’ are forgotten, the emotions whipped up by screaming hate-filled headlines fade away, sneering ‘lefty-liberals’ and ‘wokeness’ gibes quashed. Because in The Queue those labels become irrelevant. The extraordinary range of people from every ethnicity, of every age, are there because they share a love and respect for someone and something that they sense has been lost, or perhaps never was.
A monarch who was undoubtedly an admirable but very human individual in life has come in her death to gain an almost mythical status, to become a receptacle for so many hopes and fears, for so many shared experiences. Which, to quote Philip Larkin, serves “to prove/ Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.”
