Rudeness

Riddle me this: What do you join at the back, and no matter how many people join after you, you stay at the back until the end?

Answer: A Norwegian queue.

Now imagine that the queue is at the passport control counter at Gatwick.  You’ve added in a dose of British inefficiency. What you have now is a queue which never moves, and you stay at the back for eternity. Or to put it more poetically: A boot stamping on a human face forever.

I have no wish to lionise Britain’s history of exporting culture and ideas. For football, cricket and rugby we deserve credit. But you have to admit that all those years of turning up in a boat with big guns and stealing mountains of tea and sugar from confused and unarmed locals before forcing them to read bibles, undoes a lot of good work.

Yet there are things we can unashamedly teach the rest of the world. Of course, pictures of our leaders cosying up to Middle Eastern and North African despots are unedifying. But I bet they stood in line behind the rest of the West’s shamefully complicit leaders patiently waiting to grip their blood stained hands.

It is, after all, about fairness and decency and everything that’s good and true and honest.

A British queue is a beautiful thing. It is the fairest and most efficient way of making your way through a list of human beings. It makes me proud. Queue jumping makes me angry. Norwegians are the worst offenders. If embracing queues is the British national expression of fairness and decency, then jumping queues is the Norwegian national expression of selfish fuckyouism.

Go to the cinema and there are dozens of them telling you to go fuck yourself with noisy sweet wrappers the whole way through the movie. They sell big old boxes of crisps (Crisps!) in the foyer, just for such selfish cacophony. “Winner of Best Picture Oscar” is what the marketing men will go for, when The King’s Speech is looking for a cover line for the DVD. “An ending so gripping it made a cinema full of Norwegians stop fucking about with sweet wrappers for two minutes,” would be an infinitely more telling strap line for anyone in the know.

I’m struggling to get to grips with it. If Samuel and Lukas inherit the British inability to get anything done and Norwegian selfishness, they will be two of the rudest most useless boys on the planet.