30/12/2016 - An unfortunate conversation

Mum, Hannah and I drove into Bury today, after first scraping all the frost off the car and then driving through fields of fog.

After some shopping, we found ourselves in Marks and Spencers looking for baby clothes for Hannah's friend, who is due at the end of January/early February. Baby clothes shopping is both so calming (everything is pastel, and it feels so much like choosing clothes for a doll. I can't believe a little human would fit into those little dresses!) and also exacting. Mum was in full mum-mode, thinking about how quickly a baby grows in the first few months ('if we buy that she'll just grow out of it'), when a baby starts eating and dribbling, how old the baby would be in summer or winter, whether a dress would impede crawling... We settled on a pair of light turquoise dungarees with a long sleeved flower top to go underneath, and a set of baby bibs, for the dribbles.

I needed to head to the bathroom after that, but upon opening the door to the waiting space outside the male and female bathrooms I realised there was a long queue inside and so I apologised and said I'd wait outside first.

'Good,' a lady inside said, which I thought was a little weird, but maybe she just has word-farts like me sometimes.

When the queue had shortened so there was just that one lady left, I went inside to wait there. I stood on her right, since those who had entered the toilets had been on her left so I assumed the queue was going that way.

'The queue start here,' she said, and so I apologised again and moved over to her left.

Then she said, 'This being England, we queue.'

I didn't know whether to find her rudeness offensive or ironically funny, since in Singapore queue-ing is a constant sight. We queue for our favourite hawker stores, for the opening of new flagship stores, for Hello Kitty Toys, for Krispy Kreme Donuts, for the train, to remember people who built our nation. We queue in rain and in shine (and that's thirty degree centigrade sun + humidity for you) and through the night. That being Singapore, we queue.

The toilet door opened and she went in, so soon after what she said I had no time to say anything to her in response, so instead I leant the back of my head against the wall and asked God why people still judged others by where-they-might-look-like-they-weren't-from.