Sneezing stories

I used to like sneezing when I was a kid. How stupid is that? For some reason there was an element of pleasure for me in the tell-tale nose tingle, the slightly watery eyes and then massive explosion, that made me look forward to it all.

It's all different now of course. I relish my daily quota of sneezes like it's a session of electric shock therapy. It's damned annoying, the nasal irritation, the runny nose, the streaming eyes, the sniffiness, the looking like you're having an epiphany moment when instead you're staring up up at the light bulb for the last 20 minutes to coax the bugger out.

I think it was developing hay fever and allergies in my early teens that did it for me; not only did I get an itch in my nose, I would actually get one inside my head, deep in my ear canal or down the back of my throat where I'd never be able to scratch it. How infuriating is an itch you can't scratch? I often woke up in the middle of the night with this maddening, torturous tickle somewhere deep in my brain and I sooooo wanted to saw off part of my head to allow me get inside with a toothbrush like in the Reach ads and scrub it all away. And all the while I'm sneezing sneezing sneezing and swallowing repeatedly as it was the closest I could get to scratching the itch in my throat that no man could ever scratch. It nearly drove me loopy.

Sneezing styles vary of course. I favour pitching mine somewhere beyond reserved but well short of a lion's roar. My grandfather was on the other hand not so much unique in style but was rather prolific. He would always sneeze uncontrollably after drinking whiskey so every Christmas in our house we'd all sit around watching him and waiting for the show to begin. His record was set in 1992 when he sneezed 27 times in succession, no word of a lie, I was there. Counting. He said "excuse me" after about the first five but then just abandoned all pretence of manners and was soon going "Achooooooo ya fuckin' bastard ya" before pausing and delivering the next one "Achooooooahhhh fuck it anyway" and then "Achoooooo Jasus Christ whaddefuckin bastard" and so on. The one that cracked us up was "Achoooooothefuckdoyouthinkyouare for fucks sake."

That was a great Christmas.

Timid people choke their sneezes, usually in public places, but not my Dad. My Dad bellows out his sneezes no matter where he is. If you're not used to it he'd frighten the shit out of you. I was on the phone to a girlfriend once in a room at one end of the house and my Dad sneezed downstairs and she could still hear it. "What was that?" she asked. "The dog barking," I said, mortified, hoping she knew of a dog that sounded like a volcano erupting when it barked. There were other times when I looked at Hurricanes on the news and wondered did one of my Dad's sneezes inadvertently contribute to climate change.

Then there was the lad at work who absolutely put everything he had into his sneezes. He'd shatter the silence of the workplace about five times a day with these abrasive interjections and everyone would look over at him and shake their heads and mutter. His sneezes made a very deliberate high-pitched whoop noise, it was extremely distracting. I asked him about it one day and he told me that he sneezed like that ever since the day he was in school and he tried in vain to hold back a sneeze and ended up blowing snot all over his hands. He lived in fear of a repeat from then on. Everyone in the office understood straight away and let him get on with it, we'd all been there.

Anyway, I hate sneezing now. They say it's one tenth of an orgasm or something but I neither feel or look at all sexy while sneezing and grandad didn't seem particularly turned on back in 1992 either, and he'd just had 2.7 orgasms. Which was some going for a man of 83 who, now that I think of it, hated whiskey. Hmmmm.