Standing In Line In Britain
Posted by Cottontimer on 22 Sep 2006 | Tagged as: Funny, London, What the @#!
In Kate Fox’s Watching the English, she talks about the common (mis)perception that the English always form a line no matter where they are. Based on my eight months of living in London, I don’t think it’s true but that’s obviously what everyone thinks anyway.
So along comes a new blog standinaqueue (stand in a queue…i couldn’t figure out what it said at all until I visited the blog). “Stood in a queue” is documenting his little adventures standing in line across Britain. And just as I suspected, there is no definite line culture here:
Despite having the same ?L? shaped counter as in Cooplands, there seemed to be no queuing culture in this Greggs and instead customers seemed to stand in front of what would be their major purchase. For example, I stood in front of the freshly made sandwiches and an older lady to my left stood in front of the custard tarts.
He is soliciting stories about standing in a queue so I’ll try to pay closer attention to the lines I’m in to see if there’s anything bizarre I can share. No doubt there will be.

The queue at Legoland Windsor.
via noodlepie
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haha…u americans…can’t figure out british english. lol
wordpress is banned here, btw. i would love to read that blog otherwise. =\
It’s only once you leave that you realize how much people queue up for everything. I can’t understand queuing at the bus stop for instance - I’ve never been in a situation where there were too many people for the bus to pick up, or where everyone was especially eager to get on the bus first, so I don’t get the point of queuing. And it doesn’t make any sense when there is more than one bus line.
When I went to Morocco I was annoyed that people didn’t queue. At the post office people all compete to get the attention of the clerk. Whoever pushes the hardest/shouts the loudest wins.
Why is wordpress banned?
laurina: The whole time I lived in Vietnam, I was afraid they’d start banning certain blogging platforms too, like LJ. Nuts.
Am?lie: /me pushes you
Gary: Communist China keeps a tight control over blogging/bloggers. I think Blogger.com is blocked too. The censorship comes and goes. Sometimes you can access the blogs or blog-related services, sometimes now. Individually hosted domains usually escape censorship.
Rebecca MacKinnon usually keeps an eye on blog censorship all over the world, especially in China.
FYI, sometimes using an RSS feed reader like Bloglines, My Yahoo, etc. will circumvent the block.
[...] NB: My previous post about standinaqueue. [...]