It is the eerie silence of the Queues of Corona that disquiet me. No-one says a peep. Heads down like lambs to the slaughter. It is very odd to me. Especially as everyone acts like it’s always been this way. I think they queued for food in wartime Britain and in the good ole USSR but I’ve never seen it. Actually tell a lie, I did a series of shots a couple of years ago of people queuing up for restaurants like Dishoom and Flat Iron in Soho. Queuing for restos always baffled me as there are 20,000 restaurants in London, just go to another one. I can’t even begin to imagine what it will be like when they reopen and are only allowed 4 people in at a time. The only thing in my life I was ever be prepared to queue up for is a niteclub but that’s because there wasn’t any other way to get in…even on the guest list you have to queue.
I actually have queue intolerance. If I stand in line for more than 5 minutes I my feet start to shake and I have a bout of uncontrollable movement which forces me away. I jest but I actually really can’t handle queuing. Its like being stuck in traffic, it makes me feel my life is ending one minute at a time. So since this whole thing kicked off I have been queue avoidant. If there is one where I want to go I just go somewhere else. There is always a shop somewhere nearby that doesn’t have a queue so why waste your time standing like a lemon for eons? Being unfussy about what you eat is extremely beneficial in these strange times.
I saw someone reading a book on a tube once called “How to zig when everyone else zags” or something along those lines. (sure I have mentioned before on this blog). I used to take the piss out of it because I thought it was a ridic title but overtime I have found its title to be the most useful bit of wisdom ever. If you simply do shit when everyone else isn’t then you will have a pleasant and peaceful life. So since the lockdown I do not food shop friday to monday cos that is when every joe schmoe does it.
And if you don’t have everything we need, we just get by with what we got. Study your local food outlets and you can quickly work out when they are quiet and when they are not. I do often look at people in massive queues and think you must want to be there. You must want out the house, hate the people you live with or have nothing better to do because otherwise why would you waste an hour of your life to a queue? So sorry hon, it took fookin ages, and they didn’t have ginger so I had to go all the way to sainsburys on the high street and there was a massive queue there…
My main issue however is not the queues themselves in this whole lockdown shopping experience but the fact that everyone diligently stands 2 metres apart outside the shop but as soon as you are let in, everyone is on top of each other. No-one maintains social distance once inside so what is the fucking point of doing on the outside? Tescos have marked out the whole of their supermarket floors into 2 metre sections with arrows stating that you should go in a single direction but no-one abides by it at all so again, I have to ask, what is the fucking point?
I mean, I sort of get the way people act once inside. Shopping in the time of Corona is tense as fuck so we all just want it over with. But that is not a reason to sidle up behind someone so close they can feel your breath on their neck just so you can grab a jar of ragu sauce off the shelf because you don’t want to wait a nanosecond for them to get what they need and move on.
These three shots were actually from the post office queue. If you don’t want to lose an hour of your life like these people just avoid Mondays & Fridays and its mostly fine the rest of the time.
And that is the strangest paradox. People are happy to queue for nearly an hour to get in but then can’t wait two minutes once inside to get what they want. And these are the same people who made sure they gave everyone the right amount of space on the outside the shop just not on the inside. It just don’t make no sense.
I think one of the problems is Londoners don’t know how to wait or be polite or not barge their way through every situation because this city doesn’t work that way. It’s busy as fuck and you have to push past people to get where you need to get to most of the time. But these are not normal times. You can’t act like you used to. You can’t go at the pace you did. You gotta be patient and respectful, qualitites the inhabitants of this city are painfully lacking in. So if you really can’t reign in your old stress monkey ways you gotta zag when everyone else is zigging…ya zig me?