The early part of spring was dry in Britain this year, and the winter was too. Overall, the U.K. got just 47% of its average April rainfall. Some places only got 10% of their average.
As I type this (which is sometime before I’m posting it), the weather’s turned and it’s been alternately raining, drizzling, and mizzling (that’s somewhere between mist and drizzle) for three days, but we’re still short of water. It doesn’t take long in this country for isn’t-this-wonderful weather to turn into drought, and just before the rain came the papers had begun fretting about the prospect of drought.
The earliest articles warned about the apple crop, and the plums and pears, but just before the rain came the news got serious; If this goes on, an article said, it’s going to affect whisky and beer production.
Well, holy shit, the country would be in trouble.
The British media has a way of cutting to the center of any issue. I was listening to a BBC report on the problems in prisons a while back. These have—no surprise here—been increasing with underfunding, understaffing, privatization, and (not to get political about it or anything) all the other joys the current (not to mention previous) government brought us.
What sort of problems were they having? I don’t remember the full list, but it included suicides and violence, so it was serious stuff. But the problem that stayed with me was that prisoners had stopped queuing.
If you’re British, I should explain that finding a list composed of suicide, violence, and not queuing will strike people from other countries as hysterically funny. And if you’re American (or any other speaker of not-British), I should probably explain: Queuing means standing in line. and queuing is Britain’s true national religion. When people stop forming queues, it’s a sign that the culture’s falling apart.
So, my friends, the situation is serious. Prisoners no longer instinctively form orderly queues. The world as we know it is crumbling, and unless the rain continues we may not even have whiskey and beer to console us.
Not that I drink anymore, but I don’t look forward to seeing in the end of the world with a bunch of very crabby people.
I’m skiving at work so am first to comment again. And I’m going to be a Scottish pain in the bum, Ellen, again. Whisky for us. Whiskey for the Irish and Americans. Did you mean to include the Irish (we know Americans aren’t allowed into this story)? Just a question… It mizzles here too by the by.
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Actually, I have no idea who I meant to include. I was riding in the tailwind of a newspaper article that didn’t specify. But then the media here tends to pretend that Ireland (especially the Republic of) only exists if it somehow makes news of its own. Even the weather reports sort of snips Ireland off the map, although you can catch the BBC there.
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Well done for braving it in Cornwall like that. Just wait till no queuing (wow, got spelling right on first try!) reaching your parts. By the by, today celebrates my one friend in Cornwall. He is 45, his name is Dom and has recently bought a house by a creek (telling you this because for SURE you know him, you are even less than Slovenians, must be -1 degrees of separation!). He might be a reason (well, and beauty) that I visit you all one day. Nothing in the making yet though.
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We’ve got an awful lot of creeks here. I haven’t taken a survey of Doms. But as far as I know, I don’t know him.
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Bahahaha! I thought I was reading Greek or something until you qualified what queuing is all about in the U.K. Oh that hilarious language barrier and its shenanigans.
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Yeah, it’s an odd word and when I type it I’m always tempted to go on: queueueueueue.
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Have you ever been to a Harrod’s sale? (I wouldn’t dare)
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Never. But–at the other end of the sales spectrum–I have survived Klein’s on the Square (a now defunct New York store, which was always a sale). I even came away with a winter hat, although in hindsight I’d have done better if I’d let someone rip it out of my hands. It wasn’t a place where you had a lot of time to think about what you were buying.
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Good piece, I like it .
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Thanks. That’s good to hear.
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I shared this on FB. It’d be really interesting to get to the bottom of the queuing lapse. I hope some super sociological sleuthing is done. No kidding. What’s up with that??? Sign of the impending apocalypse.
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Thanks for the share. I think it is the sign of impending apocalypse–which is a hard phrase to type and not all that easy to say. Let’s hope it happens to fast we don’t have to say or type it often.
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Ground Zero is the place to be.
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Queues. Queues. Queues.
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Look at ’em all lined up there.
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I guess you know it originally means “a tail” in French, which generated figuratively “a queue” as in English, and colloquially a very manly appendix . So mind how and with whom you use it in France, though the English pronunciation makes it rather unrecognizable . .
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The colloquial meaning I didn’t know, not having had a whole lot of call to discuss said appendages.
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Come on, no need to be shy and lying is a sin … .
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Shy? Not hardly. What can I tell you? I don’t have a whole lot of interest in them. I don’t mind that other people do.
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And the only anagram of queue is … queue.
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euque?
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Now I see that you really do understand us, Ellen!
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Thank you for that, Mick. I’ll treasure it, and I’ll refer back to it next time I put my foot into some cultural booby trap.
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I think you understand us better than we do.
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There are advantages to being an outsider.
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So do the previous members of the queue mill about then, or form arrays, or perhaps huddle? Are they pressing outward or in? Have they formed a rabble, threatening to swarm the prison?
Once the queue is lost I suspect the real fear of this melee turning into a mob lies at the heart of this issue ;)
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Wow. So many possibilities. I hardly know where to start.
I actually do see the worry here. It’s just that it’s so British to list not queuing right up there with death and destruction.
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What are the prisoners refusing to queue for…the drugs and mobile `phones brought in by the warders?
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Good question. Unfortunately, the article I saw didn’t say.
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“underfunding”…. Hmmmm, not knowing the situation, it is hard to say, but having worked as a government systems analyst for years, I tend to think it is more a case of “what on?” than “how much?”
Back when I worked for the Minneapolis Police, we would get an annual eye-popping one line bill from public works for maintaining our fleet of squad cars. It ran well into the tens of millions and we would always ask…”uh, could you break that down into a bit more detail?”
“No can do” was always the answer until someone (ahem..ahem) sneaked a computer tape of the budget’s detailed entries out of the archives.
It turns out we were paying $5.60 for a gallon of gas, back when gas was around $2.40 a gallon and were paying $46 for every car wash. When the council learned of this, they agreed to issue each cop a SuperAmerica debt card and the city saved millions.
While I am neither a fan of big government nor privatization, I am a fan of the wisdom of Dilbert which ordains that “everything that is centralized must be decentralized and everything that is decentralized must be centralized”. Substitute the word privatize for decentralized and that works too.
Whenever any social structure is left in place too long (three generations typically), it forgets what it is all about and focuses entirely on maintaining institutional power and privilege.
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Oh, shit, I just wrote a long reply and lost it. I’ll be briefer this time. What this government and the last one have done is assert with no particular evidence that money is being wasted and demand cuts on all levels–massive ones. I’m sure there’s money that could be saved if they’d work from the bottom up, because that’s where the people who know what’s what are. But they’re not. What’s happening instead is that the systems are making desperate cuts that will, many of them, be very expensive in the long run. The system’s falling apart. The decentralization has been expensive and not to the benefit of the patients. I could go on and on but I’ll stop. I’m furious at what they’re doing, which is destroying a much-loved and important piece of the country’s infrastructure. Again, I’m sure money could be saved, but even if it were, the system would need investment desperately at this point.
I love what you did with the charges for maintaining the squad cars. And in your last paragraph you may be on to something.
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That’s a whole lot of problems for the UK right now. But whiskey and queues ( and the level of seriousness you’ve mentioned..boy! :p)
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It is, it is.
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I’m sorry for sending the same comment three times. I didn’t know how it worked.
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I only got two of them (and deleted one), so maybe you were right to keep sending.
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But your blog was so hilarious. I loved it.
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Thanks. I love to hear it.
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Just wanted to say how much I loved this, I am still laughing 😂
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Wonderful. My work’s done for the day, then.
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Wait, the world is ending AND we won’t have alcohol to help us through. WTF? I don’t care what happens in Britain or the other places the Scottish guy mentioned, but let’s not mess with the alcohol supply.
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Listen, it’s a dangerous world out there. I’m not able to guarantee that its end will be nice. Apologies.
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maybe that is why they are in prison…
can’t have that sort of person on the loose!
I’d have to shout at them in shops…then I’d get thrown out of the country (again)
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How many times can you get thrown out of this country? A simple tut–or so they tell me–will work wonders. Or, of course, there are the courts, the prisons. No need to overreact.
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they keep trying to throw me out, for not liking tea and telling people off for queue jumping rather than just tutting and grumbling…
I do complain about the weather though and do morris dancing so they let me stay…
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Keep complaining. That, I’m pretty sure, is the essential thing. Morris dancing’s okay, but compared to complaining about the weather it’s nothing.
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That is probably true…
I get to do both at the same time sometimes…
and I really go all british and complain about the hot and the cold…
(I do ruin it occasionally by applying logic like…Its December, of course it is cold…but I have to stop that…)
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Really. Stop. Immediately, even though it’s not yet December. You can’t be too careful.
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Right! Yes!
This sunshine../ terrible isn’t it…
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It is. And depressing, too.
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oh yes very!
I am sure it will be raining soon though, which will be equally awful!
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Yes, but more what we expect. Which–do I dare say this?–makes it good.
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hmmmm… this is tricky…
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Oi! Ellen! Would you mind popping over to my place and scrolling down to the conversation between Kiri and me after this post: https://americansoustannie.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/alternative-retirement-planning/ Your name came up; she’s being coy about asking you a question we’d both like to have answered… :)
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Sorry – not trying to use your site to promote my own, but I figure coming in at the tail-end of comments won’t hurt, and I didn’t want to copy and paste the entire conversation.
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Not a problem. As long as it’s even vaguely relevant (which is to say, not spam), I’m happy for people to leave links.
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I’ve followed the link and was no help at all. I do so love to solve problems.
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It is indeed.
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