It happened in college. I was a member of the chorus...a tenor...and we were performing Handel's Messiah before the entire student body and visiting dignitaries, including Prince Charles and Lady Diana. We were just beginning the Hallelujah Chorus when I was overcome by an overwhelming urge to sneeze! I tried desperately to suppress it, but this only worsened the problem, and I suddenly erupted in a gigantic, moisture-laden sneeze, a sneeze so enormous that it frightened the cellist sitting in front of me, and she fell off the risers. She unfortunately fell against the trombone and horn section, and they fell off the risers. One of the horn players tumbled into the percussionist and caused the drum set to overturn, releasing the bass drum, which rolled forward like a juggernaut and crashed into the conductor, Mr Eustace Rockingham, knocking him off the stage. The music screeched to a catastrophic halt as musical instruments and players tumbled in all directions.

I was mortified.

Not only that, I began sneezing again, each sneeze louder than its predecessor. I fear it was an allergic reaction brought on by nerves. I grow nervous quite easily, particularly when in the presence of Royals and other important personages.

I realized that everyone was looking at me. The audience began to titter nervously and some people burst into open laughter.

I saw the conductor, his long hair disheveled and out of place as he attempted to regain the stage. As a matter of fact, it was falling off his head! I realized for the first time that our conductor was wearing a hairpiece!

He remounted the stage with difficulty, breathing heavily, and red in the face. I fear my own face had gone quite red too. I felt as if every eye in England were upon me at that moment. I stretched out a trembling hand to assist him, and he slapped it aside.

"Pennifere," he raged at me, "you are....an idiot! A moron! The plague embodied! A harbinger of doom! You destroy everthing you touch! Next to you, Judas Iscariot was a saint! You are The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse!!! What do you have to say for yourself?"

"Sir..." I stammered. "Your...your hair is out of place..." I waved feebly in the direction of his errant hairpiece which was at that moment making its way down the side of his head and onto his left shoulder, rather like a enormous hairy spider crawling down a wall.

His eyes widened, and he made a grab for the hairpiece, jamming it back on top of his head in a somewhat off-center fashion. Gales of laughter rose up from both the audience and some of the less sensitive members of the choral group, some of whom had spent the last 4 years delighting in making my life a misery! There was the time, for example, when Albert Jones put live frogs in my boots, the time when the rugby team suspended me by my heels from the top of the Great Chandelier in the campus rotunda wearing only my briefs, and the time when Kevin Robertson-Davies gave me a "chocolate bar" which turned out to be some kind of powerful laxative, just 1 hour prior to my annual keynote address to the Tiddlywinks Club...but I digress.

I felt that I had to make amends to the entire gathering for my faux pas, but I wasn't sure how to do it. I advanced gingerly to the microphone, blew into it (one always does that to ensure that it is ON...if it is, it makes a LOUD noise), and coughed a couple of times to clear my throat.

A relative silence descended on the assemblage.

"May I say, ladies and gentlemen, that I am very...(sniff!)...I am very (hep!)...I am very....(ngggghPPHHT!)" And horror of horrors! I burst out in one final and utterly titanic and irresistible sneeze, a sneeze amplified by the overloaded microphone into an ear-splitting burst of white noise that is said to have caused pigeons to spontaneously take to the air all over Slough and at least one small lapdog to rupture itself.

I saw Lady Diana's hand fly to her mouth while Prince Charles grimaced in shock and flinched back in his chair.

And then I realized that my pants had fallen down around my Oxfords...exposing the pink underwear with the little dancing bears knitted onto it.

I shall say no more, but draw a discreet curtain across the remainder of this unfortunate incident. Some things are simply beyond the capacity of the English language to communicate the full depths of the harsh reality experienced.

- Wilfred