Strange queues for stranger things

A Queue for Inquiry

Everywhere you go in Manchester, there are queues. I am often tempted to ask someone in one of them what they are waiting for.

When it is for entrance to clubs or entertainment venues, you do wonder what event has attracted such interest or who is playing at the venue, but my curiosity does not go as far as learning the truth.

However, the stranger queues are those for people wanting to access a restaurant, or for when a product is launched and people queue up overnight to be the first to get into the shop. One finds oneself sneering about the need for some people to have a bit more purpose, but then, maybe that constitutes purpose.

Food Queues Are Not It

One rather peculiar queue was for a doughnut shop in the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront mall in Cape Town, Krispy Kreme, I think it was called. We surmised, Brian and I, that there was something in the doughnuts that was attracting the patrons: an elixir, a drug, a potion that suggested virility, or something of the sort.

I have nothing but suspicion and paranoia about such arrangements. If food attracts people like flies to faeces, to the point that they need to join long queues instead of going elsewhere, can there really be so many people so led by their stomachs?

Having no answer to that question, and possibly no full insight into the motivations of such people, imagine my surprise when I stepped out of my apartment block and saw a queue across the road. It extended beyond the front of two apartment blocks, all for a Japanese fluffy pancake meal.

The restaurant in question has already gone through one name change, and its opening hours were changed the other day. How I notice these things, I cannot tell, but they are there to be observed. It is not that I have been tempted to venture in for anything; it exists literally beside another Japanese restaurant that I once visited over eight years ago, though they are divided by a street.

The Queue Is Inviolable

As an Englishman, I like the orderliness of queues and detest queue-jumpers to the point of withstanding them at the risk of harm to myself, as was once the case in a Dutch venue. The principle, however, cannot be violated: you take your turn on a first-come, first-served basis.

I will queue for the bus, to enter an entertainment venue, at the airport, or to pay at the till. For the other kinds of queues, however, I have neither the patience nor the time to waste being a poster boy for indolence. All right, let’s not castigate them. They have a purpose for being there; I just happen to have more purposeful things to do.