I have done a lot of travelling recently, mainly by air and hence have spent a lot of time in airports. In the breaks between reading Robert Harris chapters and work stuff, I have spent some time observing humanity and how they behave in queues.
As many of you will know, there are loads of queues in airports – check-in, security, passport control, coffee, toilets, boarding, disembarking etc.
What interests me is the way that people queue. The UK is supposed to be a country where queuing in an orderly way is a national hobby. We are polite and enjoy nothing more than being a queue (except perhaps for being in a pointless queue). But times have changed and we have all travelled a bit and acquired some “bad” habits, especially from the warmer countries around the Mediterranean where there is little difference between the queue and the melee.
For example, watch an Easyjet queue at an English airport. Watch how people join it at different points and how they do this in surreptitious ways. There is the guy who is looking at the ceiling daydreaming but sidling up to the queue. There is the woman putting something in the bin but who stays close to the bin and then, magically, is in the queue. This clandestine infiltration is of course cheating but in a guilty English way – we cannot quite bring ourselves to do it like they do in southern Europe.
I am as guilty as anyone. But then I think that all of us are guilty to some extent – I guess that the bright side is the liberating of the anarchic nad free spirit in all on us.
The level of guilt came home to me earlier this month in Toronto airport. Now at the risk of being politically incorrect, let me say that Canadians can be very polite and earnest. At Toronto airport terminal 1, passport control on arriving involves queuing in a line that is then split into about 30 mini-queues in a very efficient way. The next step is then to go to the baggage reclaim area. The entry point is a single gate with a guy who allows you through one at a time (a bit like entering Noah’s Ark) in the order of joining his single queue. He turned people back who arrived out of sequence. This experience left many jet-lagged travellers so completely discombobulated that they just sat on the floor and cried in bewilderment. (If you have lost any relatives in Canada this is where they are!). I got through – I pushed to the front and when he asked me if I was in order, my jetlag forced me to say Yes.
Afterwards I was wondering what was the point of this guy. He did not check our papers. Then I got it – he was preparing us for Canada where people still queue properly, quietly and politely. I guess it si something to do in those long winters.
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