Bl**dy stupid queueing arrangements and other Irritants of that Ilk

So ... you turn up in good time at Kings Cross Station or some similar resort of leisure and pleasure. You'd quite like to just go and find your seat on the train to Leeds and, you know, sit in it. Sounds like a good plan. Unfortunately that isn't going to work because the train isn't ready, because, well, it never is. Instead the nice LED sign says "Join QB" or something, so you do, and it all seems quite well-organized and reassuring, and they even have corridors marked on the floor to show where the queue goes, and this is largely observed, and it's all terribly British and organized.

This lasts right up to the moment when they put up the platform number. And in that very second the queue quite simply vanishes as if it had never been there, replaced by a ruthless stampede across the station concourse. Pity the poor, innocent naive traveller who was just standing there going "hello trees, hello sky' when this kicked off. They are probably still looking for bits of him.

And what, pray (I hear you enquire), has become of Queue B? It is gorn, quite simply gorn my dear.

Permit me a tiny digression. In the excellent science fiction film The Abyss there's a sequence wherein a ''water tentacle" explores the underwater drilling rig Deep Core. This tentacle consists only of water and is made coherent and controllable by the almost-magic technology of Them Down There in the said abyss, who are using it as a reconnaissance tool just as the humans have the remote mini-sub Little Geek. Anyway, it is a good special effect and clever and nice an ting and all is going swimmingly (aha) until the Navy Seals, led by our anti-hero Paranoid Depth-Psychosis Bonkers Boy, Lieutenant Tw*tbrains (this is not an entirely pro-military film, by the way), get a bit miffed about it, not having been trained to deal with peaceful aliens, sort of thing. Are you still following me, by the way? We get back to Kings Cross quite soon, l promise.

So the Navy, in a tizzy, slam the door on the tentacle, with immediate truncatory effect. Deprived of its link with - er - whatever, the water tentacle stops being magicaloid and reverts to being just water. One moment it's there and looks very real and structured, and the next moment: well, it's just gorn, with a bit of a sploosh.

All of which brings me back, as promised, to the lovely Kings Cross. Readers with massively enhanced perceptual skills may have seen this coming but please don't shout it out and wake up the others. Yes Colin, it's one of those sine nomines or perhaps a metallophone: the train queue is like the water tentacle, only a bit dryer and less tentacular. Platform announcement is to queue as door is to ... ? Very good Tamsin!

I don't want to get all hypertensive over this but it really is cr*p. Queueing was actually a Great British Skill, like making motorbicycles or moaning about the weather. The disgraceful anarchy which replaced the queue at Kings Cross is fine if you're mobile, fast and ruthless, but I hate to think what it's like for someone who is only two, one or none of those things, but has turned up in good time, queued in good faith, and has had some kind of expectation that some kind of fairness or civilization would prevail. I don't see why it has to be so cr*p. If they can't sort it out so the queue works fairly (and yes, I can see how this could be difficult but you'd not think it impossible, would you?) then maybe it would be better to abandon the lie which it embodies. Instead of "Join QB" the sign could say "we can't organize this place so just mill around randomly then do the 100m push'n'dash" which would at least keep expectations realistically low. At the moment what goes on there is not good, nice or civilized and is rather more worthy of Lieutenant Fargledbrains than of the rest of us, who are still meant to be a bit nicer than that.