The End Of The Queue

As one gets older, it's only too easy to bemoan change. My mother recently announced that the New Year hasn't been the same since the war. Quite what the threat of Nazi invasion brought to December 31st that is now missing I'm not sure, but she is adamant. She's also adamant that telephones aren't what they were. Indeed they aren't. They're now mobile and she is the proud owner of a mobile phone which she loves, but...it's not the same.

For this reason alone, and so that my partner can't throw that below the belt threat of "You're just like your mother"at me, I try to embrace change.   Though perhaps next time he wants to go down that road i might remind him of the words of the wise Oscar Wilde.

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

I'm not sure that applies to gay men. I'll have to ask! This year Richard and I are thinking of making the biggest change of all, which is a house move. It's absolutely the right decision, and happy though we've been here for the past 9 years, it is time to move on, although the prospect fills me with dread. Just sitting here writing this and looking around the office at the books that will have to move  with us, makes me want to go and curl up in a drawer until the removal men come and carry me away.

 As actors we cannot afford to be fearful of change. There is nothing worse than the ossified performance, set in stone, unchangeable, unmovable, and not responding to audience or fellow actors. To try and keep things fresh is what we have to do. Not to repeat exactly on each and every take. Not to step out each evening and just recreate what we did last night.

It's the same in life. A good holiday is unique. The same resort the next year might not be as much fun, and of course it shouldn't be. Change is good, it energises, and it keeps us alert.

And yet there is one change that I absolutely am coming to bemoan. The loss of the queue! It's something the British have always been brilliant at. To wait orderly in line, and to take their turn politely when it arrives. We went out and we taught the world how to queue. Sadly however, the world that we taught don't seem to be the people who have now come to  make England their home. I love the cultural and ethnic diversity of a city such as London. But just as I, when touring abroad, will try to take onboard some of the local customs wherever possible, I think people who come to live here should do the same.

There is a test that is applied to people who are hoping to become residents of our country. The British citizenship test. It asks basic questions about history, politics and religion, and yet nowhere in it, does it tell people how to queue.

We live about half a mile from our station and up a hill. Coming home in the evening, it's all too often that I give in to the temptation of the bus stop, and wait for a bus to carry me two stops up the hill to home. It's a popular option.  There is normally quite a little crowd of us based around the bus shelter waiting for the 197or the 176 to take the weight off our feet. And that's just what it is. A crowd. Not a queue. A crowd. A crowd that surges forward to the bus door as soon as it stops with no sense of order or politeness. I quite often make the mistake of standing to one side to let older people, or females board the bus first.  Age before beauty as they say,  and I've never yet had a feminist refuse the chance to get on the bus before me.  But it's not just the women or the old who use the opportunity. People who were standing quite a way down the road just barge past, pushing their Oyster cards across you, and taking the seat you were hoping you might get yourself. The easy option would be to cast my principles aside and do likewise. I think I'm what is technically referred to as a 'big guy'. Not fat, but what might have been called in olden times "stout"  or "portly". And I'm also tall, with what I'd like to think is reasonably good and imposing bearing, so if I decided to get on that bus first, I could.

 Yet deep rooted in my psyche is the fact that I wasn't at the bus stop first.  So it's not my place in the queue.  The doctor's waiting room in our village in Yorkshire used to operate on the principle where everyone went in to see the doctor in the order they'd arrived. Nobody needed tickets, just an unspoken nodding mutual agreement as to who had come in, in what order. Now, of course, it's all tickets from a machine, or pre-booked appointments. That is of course if you can get an appointment in the first place.

 It is refreshing that some of the older institutions in the country still preserve the queue. How thrilling yesterday morning as I walked in to the Actors Centre to see an orderly queue snaking around the side of the Noel Coward Theatre, as people clutched their £10 notes in order to buy day seats for Jude Law. Long let it continue.

The queue is a mutual agreement made between a random group of people to abide by a rule  for common satisfaction. At its best, it needs no enforcing. It's just an efficient process of nature, and its British. Let's celebrate it, let's relish it, and let's hope, of course, for purely selfish reasons, that the long snaking queues around our theatres continue.