Lowri Griffiths breaks down a social contract nobody wrote down but everybody enforces
Nobody taught me the rules of the bus queue. I absorbed them, the way you absorb most genuinely important social information in this city, by getting something wrong once, very publicly, and never doing it again. The rules exist. They are rigid. They are almost entirely unspoken, and breaking them earns you a very particular kind of London silence that says more than any actual telling-off ever could.
Rule One: The Queue Is Sacred, Even When It Isn’t Really A Queue
At a proper bus stop with railings, the queue forms in an orderly line and everyone respects it with an almost religious devotion. At a bus stop that’s just a pole and a sign, the “queue” becomes a loose cluster of people who all nonetheless know, with total certainty, exactly what order they arrived in. Try to jump that invisible order and you will feel the temperature of the group drop by several degrees, wordlessly, instantly.
I once watched a woman attempt to board ahead of an elderly gentleman who had, by unanimous unspoken consensus, arrived first. Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. The entire queue simply looked at her, together, in perfect silence, until she stepped back. It was one of the most quietly devastating things I’ve ever witnessed on a Tuesday morning.
Rule Two: You Do Not Make Eye Contact During The Wait
The bus queue is not a place for connection. You may stand eighteen inches from a stranger for eleven minutes. You will not speak to them, look at them, or acknowledge their existence beyond a vague, general awareness of their position relative to your own. The exception is the rain, when a shared, silent misery briefly permits a slightly longer glance, a wordless commiseration about the state of things.
Coverage from Londonist has documented the city’s various unwritten social codes over the years, though I’d argue the bus queue remains the purest, strictest example still standing.
Rule Three: Thank The Driver, Regardless Of Everything
However chaotic the boarding, however delayed the bus, however much internal fury has built up over an eleven minute wait in the rain standing next to someone you’re deliberately not looking at, you thank the driver. Every time. Without fail. It’s the one universally agreed-upon act of kindness in an otherwise entirely silent, entirely rule-bound social system, and I genuinely love that about this city, even on the days it makes very little logical sense.
More from Lowri Griffiths at her author page on The London Prat.
Related coverage can be found at Londonist.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
