Dear Curious Iguana (The Queue)

a Fan fiction

Dear Curious Iguana,

I loved your Twitter thread, and I’ve started work on a fan fiction. Hope you like it!

❓🦎 @curiousiguana

Once you join The Queue you can expect to be there for days. But you cannot have a chair and a sleeping bag. There is no sleeping in The Queue, for The Queue moves constantly and steadily, day and night. You will be shuffling along at 0.1 miles per hour for days.

The Queue

The Queue, beginning at an undisclosed point in the centre of London, has toilets and water points and multiple websites. You cannot leave The Queue. You cannot get into it further down. You cannot hold places. There are wristbands for The Queue. Once you join, you can expect to be there for days. But you cannot have a camping chair and a sleeping bag. There is no sleeping in The Queue, for it moves constantly and steadily, day and night. You will be shuffling along at 0.1 miles per hour for days.

You soon realise the queue is making its own rules. You can only enter with a ‘song in your heart’ and you will have to stand at the entrance of the queue for hours, alone, singing loudly into your mobile phone to practice and pass the time. Meanwhile, you will be subjected to other regulations. This summer my favourite new activity is watching dozens of people join hands and chant: ‘Queue.’ They tie a tea towel around their heads. Then everyone begins to feel light-headed and laugh and laugh. People are often so touched by the traditions of the queue that they cry. The queue is, after all, the best public place to take a selfie and enjoy that perfect, London late-summer weather.

For some, the queue shows the resolute will of the working class. The queue says to the ruling class: ‘You will never, ever win.’ I know what you're thinking: ‘It's the Euro Tourists. They have all the holidays.’ Well, yes. But the queue also points to something much deeper and more political than that. Say you are in the queue because you queued to get here, just as your parents queued to leave Nazi Germany. You queued to get to school in the '80s, and if you were a little late, you queued to get into a pub on a Friday night. Queuing is old as civilisation itself. You are now in the queue because of Jeremy Corbyn. You are in the queue because you queued to get a place at university, and then to get a mortgage, to get your pension and queued to get some new rail lines and all the rest.

The queue has a motto, ‘Work as hard as you want.’ Some here are students. Others are older, like me, but whether you are in your 20s or 70s, the queue welcomes you. ‘Who needs a career? A career is for the weak,’ the queue says. It doesn't matter what job you have; your work will always be replaced by new technology. ‘Instead of worrying about careers, you should queue.’ There are the queuers with laptops and sketchbooks, with iPads and cameras. Video games. The queue is a creative metropolis. There are the queuers with microphones and there are others with stuffed animals. But for the most part the queue's members just want to relax. Many are like me: I enjoy seeing what the queue is like day-in, day-out. It seems to me a great and noble secret.

Even so, there is some concern at the increasing mass of humanity, the tensions created by such a concentration of people, so close to one another, so dense and hot. The addition of hundreds, thousands, of small children – too numerous and varied in their reactions of impatience and excitement – seem to exacerbate the problem. A plan is made for ways to contain the queue, to increase the ‘saturation’ and decrease the variety of reactions, to ensure that only ‘orderly activity’ is observed. It is thought possible to issue ‘certificates’ (in time-honoured practice) to children, ‘declaring’ them safe to pass through the queue, authorising them, like cattle, to remain there, for the duration of the display.

Many complaints, many emergencies arise – physical injuries, a great deal of unruly behaviour, some displays of drunkenness (sometimes a haze of spliff), and of aggression in the face of encroachment of the ‘lane’ on to the pavements and other public areas. At one point, a plastic cup crashes, suddenly, into the ground; it rolls a few feet, then stops and bursts into flames, like a small meteor (perhaps the remnants of an exploded rocket). The adjacent street is closed, a crowd of people fall upon it, gather it up into more queue. A dense, low pressure system moves through the city, casting a dense shroud of mist over the great mass, making everything mysterious, opaque and ‘anticipatory’ – at least for those at the front of the queue, so I hear. News of these events travels down to my place by the river, where the last of the sun catches the nose of a bronze lion that has been rubbed bright by many hands over time. The river and the ribbons of clouds in the sky, the city cluster and the bridges, are all an electric purple I want you to see, but there are no cut-ins. Families are separated by the queue. It rains in the queue. Many have formed rafts of umbrellas wedged into tree branches and tied hoarding to a network of tent poles to provide dry cover. You get used to sleeping standing up, but the birds wake you – the birds and the caterers firing up their propane tanks in the mornings leave you sleep-deprived. It doesn’t matter. When you queue, it's like being in the arms of a loving mother: her embrace is stronger than any storm, and ultimately you are comforted in the knowledge that, no matter how often the queue turns, she will always be there. Eventually.

That’s what i’ve got so far. Have a great day

All best,

Sammi x