Sleepless in London

“Eat what you can afford
The thin and fat are both God’s creatures
Thus saith the Lord!”
From Bachchoo’s Diets
(Fatbottom Books Cal.)

London
May 2012

To
Lord Sebastian Coe
CEO London 2012 Olympic Cttee.
Olympic Park
E.12

Dear Lord Coe,

Even the normally staid BBC is calling your Olympics to be the Greatest Show on Earth. Unhelpfully the Metropolitan Police, the London Transport bus and Underground staff, the British Border Agency workers and even ambulance men and women and their unions are threatening strike action if they are not paid the sums they demand for working through what will be holidays for everyone else.
If no settlement can be reached with them your Olympics threaten to present extremely uncomfortable weeks for all Londoners and visitors. The roads will be clogged, the queues at the airports will stretch onto the runways. Your distinguished visitors will, perhaps, be sleeping on the tarmac in bags supplied by the Army instead of in their five-star hotel rooms. Food and water shortages will cause people to gather in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park clamouring for the blood of David Cameron and poor Kate Middleton who should really have looked before she leapt.
I for one plan to leave London, even the Sceptr’d Isle altogether, taking refuge in Somalia or some other
calmer place.
Now the papers announce that Whitehall employees, which means civil servants, are being allowed to work from home for the seven “Olympic” weeks and transact business through Skype and the Internet. What if computer-server or electricity supply workers get inspired, they could, through unpatriotic naked self-interest, make demands and threaten strikes, too?
If London’s local government follows suit, London’s garbage collection- and parking fine- wallahs will stay at home. Think! Cars and rubbish clogging the streets. A return of rats and possible bubos (I used to think these were squid-like creatures till my grandfather told me about the glandular swellings people suffered when the plague hit India in his childhood). Now, having access to the Internet, I know better.
All this, dear Sebastian, you have anticipated and spent sleepless nights over. You must also be in the process of developing a rather thick skin, because every day new slings and arrows are projected in your direction. People complain, fairly or unfairly, that £9 billion have been spent on these Olympics and only the international elite will get to see the finals of the important races and us hoi polloi will be sold expensive tickets only for the equivalent of the quarter finals of Tiddlywinks.
So many voices of doom and you have bravely shut your ears to them all, so I assure you, since you don’t read through your ears, that I am not writing with any complaint of unfairness, demand for money, for special treatment or with any forecast of disaster.
I am writing about queues.
Nobody likes queues. Watching British shoppers at a supermarket, British youths outside a club or British passengers trying to get back into their country at an airport may persuade you of the opposite. You may begin to think that human beings adore queuing to satisfy their predilection for order. Do not be deceived. Go to any New Delhi bus-stop or any Mumbai suburban railway station and you will experience living and trampling proof of the fact that humans abhor queues. The British hoi polloi (you will never see Prince Charles or, now, Kate Middleton queuing for anything), accept them because centuries of class repression and threats of public hangings and foreign invasions have inured them to the pain.
So it isn’t the general British public on whose behalf I am pleading for a reduction or abolition of queuing. I readily concede that there will be and perhaps have to be queues to get into stadiums and queues of cars at the car parks dying to get out. These don’t concern me.
Let me get straight to the point: Throughout my short and happy life I have observed that there are very rarely any queues outside the public lavatories segregated for “Gents”; whereas outside any “Ladies” toilet at cinemas, theatres, railway stations and even at Olympic stadiums, whole queues of women line up for their pressing turns.
While all manner of unfairness besets the female gender, this is one of the most visible, unkind and avoidable. One knows what the anatomical differences are and why, as a result, the queues of women at facilities which are equally divided in space between men and women are longer, annoying and basically unfair.
This very visible and elementary fact has no doubt been pointed out to architects, planners and the like, but it seems to have made no difference — perhaps because they are all male? Now here, Seb sahib, is the opportunity for the British Olympics to set an example to the world by doubling or even quadrupling the space allocated to “Ladies”. The exact ratio can be calculated by a simple time and motion (sic) study at some thronged facility.
What I also recommend, at the risk of losing the brownie points I might have earned for my suggestion, is that these facilities have the normal washing facilities but no mirrors and certainly no stools. It may be a fact that women don’t use the precincts of a “Ladies” to re-stick their lips, brush their hair or attend to their complexion. Not having ventured very often into such facilities I cannot claim to know what goes on there, but I have witnessed women sitting in the tubes, buses and even while paused at traffic lights or other places where they can be observed, attending to their make-up without the least bit of embarrassment.
It’s no good you pleading that there is no room in the Olympic park to expand the “Ladies” facilities. Reduce standing space in the “Gents” and make sitting space for the “Ladies”!
We are all for a fairer world, aren’t we? A great British Olympic slogan could be “Say Boos to the Loo’s Queues!”

Yours in Olympic Spirit (or any other brand!), Farrukhina