Off The Cuff: A brief encounter with the beast

War brings out the best in man. That would have to be one of the most famous typos where, somehow, the letter "a" contrived to fall out of the middle of the word "best".

But best of all is, while I agree that this beast-like behaviour is brought on by the exigent nature of coming face to face with death, I must disagree with all those who think it is only a war that can do this to human beings.

Bring out the beast, that is. I've seen "the beast" up close and I can tell you from first-hand experience, it does not wear the features of a human.

I have seen these features, and I can emphasise, I was not at the war front. There were no tanks, there were no trenches, but when I saw the beast I began to pray that there were. Trenches, that is.

Yes, this wasn't the war front, but it was a battlefield all right. Man was the common enemy and everybody was fighting everybody else. The goal? To get to a certain point, which I shall call X for the time being.

Early casualties

I must have been one of the early casualties, taken out of action at the very outset. The truth is I actually undrafted myself the moment the man behind me and the one ahead of me mistook me for the filling in a sandwich. I eased out of the press gingerly, allowing the two slices of human bread to collapse against each other. That's how I came to be able to report the event in such detail.

Words of abuse, in many different tongues, rained on one and all like multi-coloured confetti.

War, some say, and they are wrong, is strictly man's business, but the battlefield in this brief report consisted of women and children as well. When the signal for battle was given, the children were the first sufferers. They got smothered and began to cry.

Usually, a child uses its cries as a weapon. Its terrified shrieks on the "battlefield" should have got the people, the beasts I mean, to stop what they were doing and rush to the rescue, or at least to revert to human form. No such thing happened.

In the airless crush of bodies, somebody elbowed a woman in the face and sent her pink-framed spectacles flying through the air. They landed right before the uplifted foot of an unsteady man. The crushing of glass was not heard in the melee, only seen.

The unsighted woman reflexively bent to retrieve her spectacles. A man promptly put one foot on her crouching back and vaulted over her, like an ambitious Macbeth, falling on the other side rather heavily and short of breath.

His other foot - the one that didn't stand on the woman's back - got entangled with another man's somewhere at the ankle. His shoe - a brown moccasin - slid off before he made his frenzied vault.

On a battlefield, I discovered, one doesn't vault back to retrieve one's missing shoes.

One presses on, regardless. Towards X, the shop counter, doing one's best, and no doubt aided by the beast in one. A day-only electronics sale offering incredible discounts, I reckon, is how a city can simulate a war zone without tanks.

Fortunately, somebody had the sense to ring the police.

The beasts promptly melted into their human disguises and it was suddenly like peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind.

If you're standing in a queue, you'll learn to distrust those qualities. You'll learn to prepare yourself for the beast that writhes beneath.