The Supermarket Queue

The British are famed, across the world, for being the only nation that bothers to form an orderly line, ever. We’re fantastic at it – from the early years of lining up ready to go back to class after our lunch hour, to the quintessential ‘waiting for a bus’, and even the often painful ‘waiting to be served in a pub’, we just love to stand in line and, for the most part, most people know the rules and stick to them. Our European cousins think we’re mad. The Spanish, for example, will ask who is last in line, ‘la ultima?’ on the surface recognising that there is a first-come-first-served policy in order, until the realisation that it’s young Pablo serving and as they know each other, (just) then that’s enough of an excuse to shout out a request and bugger who else has been waiting longer. The Germans will pre-meditate the chance that they might require a selection of sausage meat from the deli later that morning and will have therefore left a towel in front of the market stall to indicate their (possible) intentions and will expect everyone else to honour this unspoken code, should they arrive, the French will enter the arena late, make a big fuss about a particular type of cheese and proceed to ignore the queue completely and demand they are served next. The Italians will be well-dressed and apologetic in their demeanour, but this is, in fact, a tried and tested tactic to bypass the entire queue and get right to the front – leaving onlookers less upset about the realisation that they’ve been jumped and more in awe about how anyone can wear so much red leather and still look so cool….

But my gripe isn’t with queue-jumpers, or the Germans. Far from it, in fact, if you’ve got the balls, go for it – the British are too ‘polite’ to actually say anything accusatory against you, so if you can handle getting ‘evils’ from Rosemary (aged 79 from Kent) then you’ll get away with it.