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‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his
gate, God made them, high and lowly, and ordered
their estate.’
The academic theory tells us that when we stand in a
queue we are asserting our right to an
estate
both as a
physical space and as a status, which is calibrated by
the non-fungible commodity of time. Good word that
- fungible, it means replaceable. Time cannot be
replaced so it is non-fungible. The academics claim
that there is a relationship between the Anglo-Saxon
concept of estate ownership and the social discipline
inherent in the practice of queuing.
One study used the behaviour of visitors to the Hong
Kong Disneyland to illustrate this concept. The Hong
Kong Chinese conformed to the recognisably
Anglo-Saxon rules of the queue whereas the mainland
Chinese showed a strong resistance to the concept of
queuing. Indeed so alien is queuing to the Chinese
that the 15 million inhabitants of Beijing were
instructed in the art of queuing in the run up to the
2008 Beijing Olympics. The Chinese Communist
Party designated the eleventh day of each month as
“Queuing Day” choosing the eleventh day because
the figure 11 resembles two people waiting in a line.
Catchy slogans were pasted up “To queue is civilized,
to be polite is glorious.” Volunteer wardens with big
red sashes were posted to bus stops to encourage an
acceptance of queuing protocols. And by golly they
queued at the Beijing Olympics. Everyone queued
from ordinary folk to presidents and kings!
The Slow Wait for Fast Food
This summer at the Olympic Park in Stratford for the
London 2012 Games I didn’t queue at all, not once
and not even for the loos! I was expecting to queue,
indeed I had suffered pangs of anxiety that there
would be such long queues for the special Olympic
bike parks that I wouldn’t get a place and I’d be
forced to chain my bicycle to a lamp post from where
it would be removed and blown up as a suspected
terrorist bike. In the event my time would have been
better spent worrying about it getting lonely all on it’s
own in the staggeringly empty bike parks. Months
later it still sports London 2012 security tags like
proud Pony Club rosettes.
By far the longest queue I saw inside the Olympic
Park was for the barn-sized McDonald’s. In China
McDonald’s had to run their own campaign to teach
the Chinese how to queue when they opened their
first restaurants in the country in 1990 but the
Russians needed no lessons as long time experts in
the art of queuing having endured decades of
shortages of just about everything. By dawn on 31
January 1990 more than five thousand people were
already waiting in line outside Russia’s first
McDonald’s in Moscow and they queued all day
long. By the time they locked the doors that evening
McDonald's Moscow had set a world record serving
more than 30,000 customers. Ironically people had
queued for over six hours for their first experience of
supposedly fast food .