Right, everyone. I need to be serious for a moment. Because the greatest thing that ever happened is happening right now. I don’t particularly care either way about the Queen. But the queue? The Queue is a triumph of Britishness. It’s incredible. Just to be clear: I don’t mean the purpose of the queue. I don’t mean the outpouring of emotion or collective grief or the event at the end and around the queue or the people in the queue. I mean, literally, the queue. The queue itself. It’s like something from Douglas Adams.
It is the motherlode of queues. It is art. It is poetry. It is the queue to end. all queues. It opened earlier today and is already 2.2 miles long. They will close it if it gets to FIVE MILES. That’s a queue that would take TWO HOURS TO WALK at a brisk pace. It is a queue that goes right through the entirety of London. It has toilets and water points and websites just for The Queue.
You cannot leave The Queue. You cannot get into The Queue further down. You cannot hold places in The Queue. There are wristbands for The Queue. Once you join The Queue you can expect to be there for days. But you cannot have a chair and a sleeping bag. There is no sleeping in The Queue, for The Queue moves constantly and steadily, day and night.
You will be shuffling along at 0.1 miles per hour for days.
There is a YouTube channel, Twitter feed and Instagram page, each giving frequent updates about The Queue. Because the back of The Queue, naturally, keeps moving. To join The Queue requires up to the minute knowledge of where The Queue is now.
The BBC has live coverage of The Queue on BBC One, and a Red Button service showing the front bit of The Queue.
NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD JOIN THE QUEUE AND YET STILL THEY COME.
“Oh, it’ll only be until 6am on Thursday, we can take soup”.
And the end of the queue is a box. You will walk past the box, slowly, but for no more than a minute.
Then you will exit into the London drizzle and make your way home.
Tell me this isn’t the greatest bit of British performance art that has ever happened? I’m giddy with joy.
It’s fantastic.
We are a deeply, deeply mad people with an absolutely unshakeable need to join a queue.
It’s utterly glorious.
@toomuchmotheringinformation
The Queue – The Musical pic.twitter.com/x8dCSXlFzN
— Rob Madge (@Rob_Madge_02) September 15, 2022
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I am reminded of an image I saw of an IKEA queue of ‘muzzled muppets’ snaking all the way around the car park during the early days of the Covid ‘scamdemic’. Those at the back must have waited God knows how many hours just to get entry to buy their ‘Contiboard crap’, and possibly have to queue up again a day or two later when they find the some of the contents are damaged, missing, or do not fit together correctly, But, hey! After almost remorselessly standing in said car park, and after you have done your shopping, you eventually get to the place they laughingly call a restaurant – so that you can gnaw away at some gristly meatballs. Never mind, eh? It was good practice for the next day when you had to stand in another long queue to buy your supermarket groceries, and only to find the fight to get toilet rolls and hand sanitiser was akin to a mediaeval battle scene.
Further to my last comment, I have now read this on another website:
“The flood of grief from the death of Queen Elizabeth II forced the British government to call a temporary halt to people joining a miles-long line to file past her coffin as it lay in state Friday, hours before King Charles III and his siblings were to stand vigil in the historic Westminster Hall.
A live tracker of the queue said it was “at capacity” and entry was being “paused” for six hours as waiting times reached 14 hours and the line stretched 5 miles from Parliament to Southwark Park in south London and then around the park.
(Name withheld) of London said that she got to the line around 4 a.m. Friday.
“I think it is a moment in history, and if I did not come and celebrate it and see it and be part of it, I think I would really regret it,” she said.”