sent from: London, UK. destination: London, UK

I blame Batman Returns.
It’s a film that, with Nolan’s towering trilogy behind us people are looking back to, which reminded me of my own very visceral reaction to it. We (some or all of my siblings, I don’t remember exactly) saw it at the cinema in Staines, now commercial offices. The sound mix, deliberately or otherwise, was so loud and assaulting it caused me to physically recoil from the screen and hold myself tight. I kept my arms to my chest and occasionally plugged my ears. I figured it was just Tim Burton big budget excess; Danny Elfman pulling out the stops, and a relentless barrage of noise.
In the car on the way home there was the usual jostling and joking. Without preamble I felt a stabbing pain in my chest and my breath became shallow. Any deeper was agony. I tried to say something and it was, if not, exactly dismissed, then taken as the histrionics of the dramatic youngest sibling. My sister, then a young GP, thought I was overdoing it. As I lay on my side in pain at home I thought I felt an empty flapping sound in my chest, a deflated balloon. The next day an X-ray revealed I’d had a collapsed lung – spontaneous pneumothorax. Not unheard of amongst young, tall, blond men.
But I still blame Batman Returns.