Ill Behaviour

Sometimes something happens in front of me, and although it is fascinating and extraordinary at the time, the thought that pops into my head is not 'Ohmygod, that's fascinating and extraordinary,' but 'Ohmygod I can't WAIT to write about this.'

That happened this morning.

I was on a fairly packed commuter tube northbound, standing in the central atrium bit, leaning against the glass partition that separates the standing section from the seats. Despite the high density of people, I'd managed to angle myself so that I could read my book, the brilliant River of Time by Jon Swain, tales of 1970s Cambodia and Vietnam so potent and engrossing that I momentarily forgot where I was. But suddenly, across the width of the carriage, by the opposite doors, someone sneezed - a strange, cracking noise that jerked my attention. I looked up from my book. There, a metre or so away, was a young man who, from the mouth down, was completely covered in opaque white vomit. It had clearly taken him utterly by surprise. Several people around him had been splattered by the force of the eruption. It was all over him, down his chin, his shirt, over his suit jacket which he'd draped over one arm; thick, smooth emissions like emulsion paint, but with small yellow items flecked within. I'm guessing he'd had something like the world's largest ever bowl of Ricicles for breakfast. A matter of seconds later, we pulled in to a station and he exited. The remaining people looked around, some horrified, some smiling, all silently listening to their own world, white headphones snaking into their ears. It was British tolerance at its best.

The space vacated by the puker stood empty for a couple of stops, and in that time, I was able to secure a seat, three away from the vomit-covered partition on the same side. The girl sitting next to the partition had a good half pint of vomit sliding down the other side of the glass to her left, but she appeared to be calm. Then a man boarded the train, saw the rare area of space, pushed through to stand in it and then leant on the partition, covering his dark jacket in another man's sick before 9am. Disappointing. When another passenger alerted him to his nightmare, he dealt with it well, blushing and giggling rather than getting angry, and later helpfully pointed out the offending matter to another young man who had been about to make a similar mistake. It was all rather cheery. And a tube first for me.

It brought to mind my old hairdresser, Helen, who told me that when she had been pregnant she'd suffered really badly from morning sickness, and was always ill on the train to work every morning. At first, she'd held it in until a station, and then got off and been sick into a bin, and got back on the next train, but eventually she just took a plastic bag on board with her every morning and was quietly sick into it without even getting up from her seat. I was fairly disgusted at the time but if I'm ever pregnant, maybe I'll understand. Somehow I don't think morning sickness was the cause of the sneeze-chunder explosion I witnessed this morning, though. Unless science has moved on very quickly in the last week without my knowledge.

On an unrelated subject, last night I went to see Trash City at the Roundhouse. It was a weird cabaret spectacle with a fantastic set and bizarre performances including a vast black man dressed head to toe in white tulle singing a terrible version of Fix You by Coldplay, several strange transvestite geishas doing dance routines to what Chris described as nineties-influenced big beat, whipped cream, Alice Cooper, an hilarious song called something like 'Everyone's Fucking But Me', weird acrobatics, pole-dancing robots, nude women smeared in something resembling Marmite and then eating fire, heart-shaped balloons, feathers, and a vast dinosaur made out of reclaimed metal and a motorbike engine that thudded its way through the crowd as a finale. I love things like that. I don't really understand them, I don't have a clue what motivates people to put them together, but it's good to be out of the usual headspace, a bit like a legal LSD trip without the comedown or the panic about violent flashbacks which clearly never really happen but which we were warned about so persuasively at school that I have never done acid - something about a woman who was driving her kids down the motorway twenty years after she took a tab, and started seeing huge insects flying towards her and swerved to avoid them and wrote off her car, killing herself and her kids. And then another girl who stabbed herself to death in the bath with nail scissors, which, in retrospect, I'm not sure is even possible. Still, the horror stories worked. And Trash City is cool.