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The queue is properly anarchic - anarchy being not a free-for-all in the sense of competing selfishness, but a free-for-all in the sense of collective responsibility; and when you look at it like that it seems so wholly un-English. A place where the Dute stands behind the butler and the Dame behind the lap-dancer - all organised without the need of a big stick. There is no common law pertaining to queues, no high-court judgment. Queues weren't mentioned in the Magna Carta or the Book of Common Prayer; there's no nursery rhyme game about queueing. The queue involves no equipment - it is the perfect piece of organic social engineering.

Every English person has a cautionary tale, an apocryphal story, about those who transgress the un-law of queues - often foreigners. I've just been told this one, a story of a ski-lift. Apparently the lift was a little funicular. It pulled into a platform, its doors opening and closing automatically. People hopped on, clipping their skis to a rack on the side. The queue was long. As my storyteller got to the platform a band of strapping Germans loudly shoved their way to the front and jumped into the next empty car.
The rest of the queue looked on in fury, the automatic doors closed and the Germans looked back with their characteristic mien of Germanic entitlement and triumphalism.'We came to ski, not to stand in line,' their faces said. And then just as the car began to move, a slight middle-aged man, an Englishman of no distinction with a look of calm determination, trotted onto the platform and unclipped the German skis, laying them with exaggerated care on the platform. German faces were wiped with impotent indignation and mimed threats. The queue erupted into polyglot cheers, the little Englishman was slapped on the back. His hand was wrung and he made his way back to his place in the queue.
Now, the Englishman who told me this story said that nothing that had happened to him had made him so incandescently angry as the German queue-bargers - or as elated as the revenge of the little man. It had filled him with such a cosmic release of trandescent happiness and prid at the chap's very ordinariness, that it had thaken all his prep-school-taught discipline not to burst into tears. 'It still pricks my eyes when I think of it, and you know the really important bit, he went back to his place in the queue. No one would have gainsaid his right to jump into the next carriage, he'd earned it. But he went back to his place in the queue. you should have seen him, he'd have been played by John Mills in the film.'