Where are the queues?

A Polish railway worker has awoken from a 19-year coma to find that the has slept through the downfall of communism.

When Jan Grzebski was hit by a train in 1988 he was in his mid-forties and living under a regime of food shortages.. Now that he has regained consciousness, however, he has observed that the dramatic transformation of the Polish economy and the invention of modern technologies such as the mobile phone appears to have done little to cheer his countrymen up.

'When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere,' he told the Polish news channel TVN24. 'Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin. What amazes me is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning - I've got nothing to complain about.'

It was his wife who never gave up hope and who tended for him during the coma said: 'For 19 years Mrs Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections.' Said Dr Boguslaw Poniatowski .

Mrs Grzebska is a determined woman who never gave up hope that her husband would recover. While it is not unknown for people to awake from a coma after so long*, it is a remarkable story. I daresay the story will be filmed but I do hope it isn’t called Goodbye Jaruzelski!

* In 2003 Terry Wallis also awoke after a 19 year coma.