Word: queueing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...head hasn't quite lived up to its advance publicity; what does, these days? The mere possession of a ticket, raved the New York Times last June, "will have the magical properties of fairy gold . . . ((It)) will turn frog into prince and frump into Circe." This frog joined the queue for tickets in Pall Mall last week...
...Already about 400 other frogs (many of them English ones, heavily reinforced with Japanese and Americans) are in the queue; the earliest ones, real frogs from France, had been here since 7. Dress: sneakers, blousons, & rucksacks, jeans. A suit or two. We are a long way from the days when a minister, arriving at Buckingham Palace in trousers rather than knee breeches, was asked why he had joined the retinue of the American ambassador...
...fork out 8 pounds and receive a ticket that will let me in between 9:45 and 10 a.m. A semidignified rush to the back of the palace, where yet another queue, slower than the first, has formed. We are filtered through security -- real security, not the flimsy check you get at airports...
...third queue, inside the courtyard of the palace. We are standing on, or somewhere near, a failed silkworm farm, which was how the place began. In 1623 the Earl of Middlesex leased the land from James I to grow mulberry trees to feed the worms. Alas, the earl planted the wrong trees, and the worms did not spin. Eighty years later, it was leased again by the Duke of Buckingham, who built a house there. Then George III bought the house, which was enormously enlarged by his son George IV: it was his special folly. His son William IV pronounced...
Would tourists still flock to London to watch the lesser royals queue up at bus stops or elbow their way through soccer crowds? Would the British really relish a workaday monarchy like Denmark's? The problem with all solutions to the current problems of the royals is that their historically entrenched tradition is profoundly irrational. Early in Victoria's reign, Walter Bagehot wrote of the crown, "Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic." Sometime, probably not very far in the future, the British people will have to decide whether they want the magic...