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I took the tube to work this morning at rush hour. It was absolutely mobbed. Carnage. You know the drill. Queues of anxious commuters waiting to board. TFL guy yelling incoherently about the doors.
Managed to squeeze on. The usual smell of bad breath and shower gel.
There's normally a sort of blitz spirit on these occasions. Dark humour. How can there not be, when you can literally smell what the person next to you had for dinner last night?
But today was different. The crowd was tetchy. There had been some jostling on the platform, and the odd (half-embarrassed) cry of "move DOWN". When I boarded, a lady with a strong Liverpudlian accent had started yelling at the guy next to her for squashing her arm.
So we're barrelling along between stations, and we are squeezed in TIGHT. Barely able to move my head, I turn my head and look to the right.
What I see there chills me to my very core.
What I see there chills me to my very core.
About three feet away, there's a small bloke standing with his back to the door. Must be 16/17 years old. He is truly hemmed in, arms locked to his side, his wee head like the end of a sausage poking out of a hot dog. And the look on his face is one of sheer terror.
His eyes are wide. His nostrils are flared. He's moving the top of his mouth in a circular motion and frantically crinkling and uncrinkling his nose.
The poor bastard is about to sneeze.
The poor bastard is about to sneeze.
For a moment I wonder if he might be able to suppress it. He's trying his best. He's doing everything he can. But I can see that he is ultimately powerless. Like a gathering storm, the sneeze cannot be resisted. It is a force of nature.
I enter a state of high alertness. On a quick calculation I reckon that I am outside of the immediate blast radius, and so am probably safe. But there must be five people in direct danger. Five grumpy commuters. One of them is Angry Scouse Lady.
In the microsecond before the sneeze comes, I lock eyes with the guy. He looks at me like a man who has been sent to the gallows. I try to look sympathetic.
I can still see it in slow motion. It begins as a sort of spasm deep down inside the guy, an irrepressible wave of energy building from his abdomen, spreading up through his chest and neck, rushing to burst out through his nose.
His head jerks back, hitting the door behind him. His eyes are closed. In the same second, the people surrounding him begin instinctively to recoil
I can see Angry Scouse Lady's eyes widening as she realises, much too late, what has befallen her.
But at the very moment of climax, the instant when I thought my fellow Londoners would be covered in nasal debris, something incredible happened. I'll remember it til the day I die.
His jaw clamped shut, our man somehow takes the full brunt of the sneeze internally. His entire face - cheeks and upper neck area - expand outward like a bullfrog before rapidly contracting again. He emits two noises simultaneously: a high-pitched squeak and a deep, gutteral moan
It was LOUD. Half the carriage crane to look. No one knows what's going on. The guy's eyes are half-closed and streaming with moisture. Were it not for the passengers propping him up, he'd have collapsed from the effort.
I've never seen anything like it. It brought to mind a story I saw recently where a dude ruptured his throat trying to suppress a sneeze ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42687970)
After a few seconds he opened his eyes and we again acknowledged each other's presence. He must have seen the admiration on my face because he gave me an imperceptible nod - regal, magnanimous - modestly recognising the scale of his achievement, but without wishing to gloat
That guy is my morning hero, and I wrote this thread in homage to him.
