Drinking and queueing - a paean to two national passtimes

Well my friends, it’s been a while. Are you still my friends – all three of you?

Time marches ever on while we mere mortals peep, bewildered, around at our new surroundings.

Nope, sorry, that’s just bollocks isn’t it.

A year has passed, nearly two, and everything is exactly the same. It’s Friday afternoon and I’m sat in the exposed concrete shell that constitutes a trendy London PR agency office trying to engage a preoccupied media with some stuff about a thing whilst nursing a head full of fog and a perpetual cup of tea.

Last night I queued up outside Londis by Clapham Common until a burly man deigned to let me in and join queue phase two inside of Londis to purchase a beer. After this, I waited briefly inside the door of Londis until the outside queue could be shuffled backwards sufficiently for the door to be opened allowing me to leave and then I joined what can only be described as a queue which on other days, I am reliably informed, is actually just the street.

Fireworks night my friends! And in these cash strapped, miserable times, who doesn’t feel a little bit cuddled by the notion of pretty-coloured gunpowder blasted into the sky and paid for by Lambeth Council? Lambeth Council, an entity more familiar to me as sender of bills, loser of personal information, threatener of bailiffs for unpaid council tax by someone who isn’t me and perpetrator of epic queues leading ultimately to £120 documents entitling me to park outside my own house. At least they’re consistent with their queues.

I remember the fireworks being bigger in years gone by, with unforeseen quirks of brilliance: reds turning to greens and faltering sparks bursting unexpectedly back to life with a fizzle. This year, the novelty started to falter as quickly as the sparks and like them, it had no reinvigorating tricks up its sleeve. The council’s seamless selection of Thriller into something inane by the Lighthouse Family was pretty funny though. That saw us through for a bit. Soon after, we entertained ourselves watching a family scrabble about in the mud looking for something they’d dropped – heroin, we decided.

The finale was a crescendo of colour and noise. I hummed the Lighthouse Family in my friend’s ear and my boyfriend squeaked like a mouse at the explosions. We are rubbish people to double date with. I think that’s perfectly apparent just from my cringey use of ‘double date’! Gross.

Afterwards, we meandered gently through the police cordons and in front of buses and terrified looking cyclists and weaved our way between frantic mothers and their separated children and had our toes taken off by angry mothers with prams, truly the urban woman’s weapon of choice. We had battled it out, braved the mob, kept our resolve in the face of agoraphobia-inducing crowds and now we deserved more alcohol.

Sadly, our plight was shared by everyone in Clapham. You should have seen the queues at the bar.