There aren’t many nice things about travelling on the tube. And this wasn’t one of them. Not only do I routinely not get crushed against anyone remotely attractive, I regularly get sandwiched between people with obviously infectious diseases. Today I had a man attempting to mount me all the way to Oxford Circus. When I turned to remonstrate with him, he reminded me so much of a snake shedding its skin, that I quite lost the will to live let alone fight. Instead, I was forced to nestle even closer to the pointy woman in front of me. With her cold.
Now, everyone makes a judgement when boarding a crowded tube train: do I hold onto my bag and use the suffocating crush of commuters to hold me upright and cushioned against the inevitable lurching around, or put the bag down and risk losing it forever so that I can try to reach the slightly less fetid air near the ceiling and grasp the relative security of the hand rail?
Pointy Sniffing Woman had opted to keep hold of her unnecessarily large carpet bag. And this caused a slight problem. As the snuffling and the premonition of what would happen next intensified, she tried to raise her hand. Obviously impossible, carrying a bag. And, in the same way that if you keep your fist clenched around a sweet at the bottom of an antique vase something bad will happen, something bad happened.
There was nothing to stop the sneeze. We heard it coming and pathetically tried to move out of the way but in a beautiful example of chaotic balance, our opposite thrusts left us exactly where we started. I was lucky: just a fine misting. A poor man in a suit bore the burnt of it. Still, as we exploded onto the platform, he did manage to smear himself on three or four other unfortunates. I simply wiped my face and prepared myself for the next stage of my journey.
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