Wood Green Animal Shelter, Cambridgeshire

Quite a grim day today so we went for a little outing to Wood Green Animal Shelter. Once you get over the smell the time can pass quite quickly.

Although you do have to be careful of what you queue for.

That’s Farm at the back of the queue wearing the inside out sheep. She quite liked this queue because, although it was a slow mover, when you got to the front you could get one of these:

This was Molly, who we then got to take for a walk.

After a bit of Here Molly, Hello Molly, Aren’t you lovely Molly?, we had to take her back to the queuing area.

We half heartedly stood behind this rather large Mother and daughter combo, and reluctantly waited to hand Molly back.

When they got to the front of the queue, Farm and Marc weren’t yet sure about Molly.

But I had my suspicions.

Marc couldn’t decide on an empty stomach so, as it’s a Friday, we went and had some fish and chips at the Wood Green canteen.

While in the queue we looked over Molly’s particulars.

It said that she could be a bit shy at first and was rather wary of very tall people, but once you got to know her she was a total cuddle slut. Or something like that.

So after our fish and chips, which were very good, we went back to the main reception.

And Farm and Marc said that they would very much like to give Molly a home.

Then we saw a horse.

But Farm said she had no room for a horse.

Selfridges, Oxford Street

First stop was a new coat for Matthew. For the amount of money it cost he didn’t actually take that long on deciding which one he wanted.

Which was a shame as we were sat on a very comfy leather sofa.

The only evidence of which is this accompanying footrest.

Also, at this price, you do not seem to get many customers in the queue.

But then again, this could be because everyone else had bought their three quarter length last month when it started getting cold.

If you wish to avoid long queues you must purchase items at the wrong time of year.

For example, now would be a bad time to buy Christmas decorations from the Christmas department.

Which is of course what we did.

There’s nothing quite like a department store at Christmas. They push festive spirit onto the customer with the same persistance as a crack dealer.

With such cheer in the air, a 30% promotional discount on selected lines and Would you like a basket Madam?, Claire was quickly hooked.

After about an hour she had carefully selected six hanging baubles, and so then off to the queue we went.

We originally made a small faux pas by queuing behind the person being served at the till. But were quickly informed by the queue monitor that there was indeed a queue on the other side of the store where other people were also waiting.

After such grand efforts around the rest of the store, I thought that the queue signage was a bit of a let down. What about a black background with some gold, swirly typeface? I mean really, I’ve seen Woolworths try harder than this.

Rather sturdy queue enforcers.

Once you were in that was it. No turning back.

And you could see why they needed them. It was all starting to take a horribly long time and, without the barriers in place, it would have been quite easy to have put the basket down and called it a day for Christmas shopping.

With such a long length of time to consider your pending purchases, previous queuers had, quite rightly, lightened their baskets of some of their ill chosen Christmas decorations. Which were then left willy nilly in the displays along the queue’s edge.

Butterflies and Christmas do not go.

Once we had reached the front of the queue, we were again in the hands of the queue monitor.

She was an extremely attentive queue monitor, and directed us to the first available till (there were only two tills) with such eagerness and with such gusto, that I was instantly awakened from my momentary boredom and almost started to shriek with panic.

But luckily, I did not.

And we waited patiently by the almost free till, and were then served.

At the end of the transaction Matthew showed us a £24.oo bauble that he wanted to buy.

He was firmly told to put it back.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Not as many queues as I thought there’d be. A lot of times you’d just sit down and service would come to you. Although, when they had to queue, the Dutch did a marvellous job of it.

Costa Coffee, Tibshelf Services M1

Mid journey pit stop for a latte.

You can’t really queue either side of this sign. The till on the left is for display purposes only.

But you can queue on the right, at the one till with two servers.

Even though two tills with a server each would mean faster coffee. But what’s the rush?

The gentleman in the white shirt was getting rather impatient and was sidestepping a lot, but a couple more minutes between him and the chocolate brownies wasn’t going to hurt.

I’ve also noticed that while standing in queues, men will often tuck in their shirt.