Us Brits used to be known for our ability to queue.
While other nations stereotypically shouted, pushed, squeezed into trains, and honked horns, the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman would tut disapprovingly and staunchly stick to queuing up.
But no more. Alas, those days are gone.
Queues are a thing of the past. Instead of waiting your turn, you push as hard as you can, take shortcuts, barge people aside - because all of that is apparently easier than waiting.
As the crowds of commuters emerge from trains on London's underground network, there is no orderly line to the escalators. Instead, it's a stampede, a feral contest that quite literally is survival of the fittest. A hippopotamus of a man tramples a timid, elderly lady underfoot. Look another way and two power-dressing businesswomen hiss and shriek at each other like agitated cheetahs. And while some of us queue to get our place at the bottom of the escalator, an ageing gazelle-like woman skirts the outside of the crowd to get to the front. It really is a jungle out there!
And it's not just commuters in the big smoke. Try holding someone up on the roads, either from being too careful, or making (heaven forbid) a mistake. You will live to rue the day. And while a traffic jam used to mean a sigh of despair and a long, boring wait, now it's a scramble of people trying to find a way out. Whether that's driving down the hard shoulder, reversing up slip roads or any other "bending" of the law, that doesn't really matter because the only thing that does is getting there, and quick.
Of course, we're all led to believe this is "just the way it is". We should be prepared for this. It's just life, especially in the 24/7 world we live in where the clock is always ticking and of course, we all know the old adage "time waits for no man".
But it hasn't always been like this.
People really did used to queue. Patience used to be an important attribute, not something to be scorned.
So what's changed? Is anything we're rushing for any more important than it used to be?
The answer is probably no. If you're late for work is the world going to stop turning? If you don't get this train and get one in two minutes time, is that likely to be a life-altering moment? If you have to wait for the next green light is that going to ruin your day? To all of these, the answer is it's highly unlikely. Yes of course we all know the sliding doors scenario - one false move, wrong decision or two-minute delay can possibly, rarely, change your whole life. But generally? No.
The irony is, we probably all know this deep down. But our own importance and this behaviour is almost a self-perpetuating circle. We want to be important, so important that being late, or absent, will really ruin things! So we try not to be, getting more and more agitated at trying to counter every eventuality, beat every contingency and bring order to an unpredictable world.
In this process, we start to actually believe it. If I miss this train, I'll be two minutes late. I can't be late, what will they do? And on and on, ad tedium!
The sum total of this sorry situation is a world full of people so obsessed with our own importance that we can't see the bigger picture.
Instead of waiting, helping the weaker, the frail and the elderly, we focus on our strength, our speed and our wily ways to make sure we get places first. The person who pushes in, goes round the queue to the front, who cuts you up, breaks the rules, do that because THEY are more important than YOU. THEY need to get to where they are going quicker than YOU do to where you are.
That's the sad truth of the situation - we are a nation obsessed with our own importance.
But what's perhaps sadder is that this is not written in the third person, about a few. This is about you, and me, and a worrying majority of the population. We all do it, we're all sucked into the modern myth that we cannot wait, we must be quicker, tougher, stronger and more aggressive In everything we do - and hang the consequences.
Perhaps we need to stop, take a breath, and remember what it's like to wait in line.
Because after all, there's always someone at the back of the queue or the bottom of the pile who needs a helping hand, or just wants to take their own turn - and that, my friends, will one day be me and you!
