Men behaving badly (M of course!)

[atchoum]

Generally speaking, restaurants aren’t bad as places to observe sneezes. Quite a few people tend to have sneezing spells if they drink a bit, and a fellow SFF tells me that some of his best observations are in restaurants late at night. Usually though, people tend to moderate their sneezes in restaurants, or stifle them completely. A couple of recent observations however suggest that this is not always the case.

The first was in a restaurant on Sunday lunchtime. There was a table just behind me with a family of about ten people settling down to lunch. There was one man in his mid to late 40’s, tall and burly, with fair curly hair, dressed rather more casually than everyone else. After about half an hour the quiet conversations were interrupted by two very loud sneezes – very male, completely unchecked sneezes, not forced, but just naturally loud. Everyone stopped talking and looked at the sneezer – the casual man I had noticed before. About a minute later there was another loud sneeze – a single this time. By now I thought there was probably a sneezing fit in the making, so I kept watching him out of the corner of my eye. The man went on talking to his family as if nothing had happened, then would stop talking, half open his mouth and give off one of his eruptive sneezes. People at other tables started murmuring about such a lack of discretion, but he paid no attention. After half a dozen of these sneezes the reflex must have played itself out, as the last sneeze (number 8) took some coaxing out, a couple of false starts and much eyelid fluttering, then a rather underpowered sneeze compared to the others.

The second was the day before yesterday, also at lunch but at a popular restaurant. A man of early to mid thirties, dark, also quite burly, who was talking very loudly to a male friend of his of similar age, so much so that it was quite hard to follow the conversation at the table where I was sitting. Just as they had finished their coffee, I looked around to see if they were leaving, to see the noisy man suddenly rear up and spit out a loud wet sneeze, aimed at the corner of the room, but completely unrestrained. Once again, I am sure there was no exaggeration in the sneeze, the man just had a pretty violent sort of sneeze reflex, but it was extraordinary that he should just let rip as he did. Just another uninhibited bloke, I suppose.