I am a drug addict. At night I lie in bed, too hot to sleep. My head pounds, my clammy skin itches and burns. I can’t breathe. If I sleep my first thought when I wake is of nothing else but reaching for my drugs - the idea of going another minute without them too terrifying to consider. One pill popped and I know it will make me better. I think it will make me better. I hope it will make me better.

I know, deep down, that it makes no difference at all.

So my eyes go a little less red. So my mind clears long enough for me to remember where the bathroom is or that human society requires people to answer their front door clothed. The symptoms always come back in an hour or so, just when you think they’ve gone away. Just when you think you’ve had your last sneeze. This is the curse of the summer, and I am finally becoming a vampire. I am allergic to the outside world.

There are two types of people in this world - people who get hayfever, and people who wonder what people with hayfever make such a fuss about. I’ve been both. I never used to get this contemptible little affliction until two years ago, when it suddenly appeared from nowhere, like a visit from an unwanted relative. I remember walking through Tavistock Square, where huge clumps of pollen, seeds and other such vile treebits were in quite visible swarm. They said that year many people spontaneously developed hayfever who had no such allergy before. This is a war, and many fell that summer in nature’s devastating attack on day to day life; days that live on in infamy. It is intolerable, and like vampirism and unemployment, is insidious in its conspiracy to stop you living any sort of normal life during daylight. Oh, how I press my snotty nose against the window and watch the normal children at play! How I long to enjoy a glass of wine and a cigarette; how I crave being able to taste my food!

Having since tried what feels like every drug on the market in the space of only two summers, from the budget to the not so Tesco Value, I have found only two things that make any real difference (remembered from my days as a budding teenage hedgewitch). I here share these with anyone else so similarly suffering. First, honey. Ideally locally made, but a spoonful of honey works wonders for a tickly throat. Honey is an excellent natural antihistamine, and local honey is of course made from the very little bastards who are doing this to you in the first place. Of course, not all of us live in a Miss Marple novel so finding something made locally isn’t always a possibility. For those of you not accustomed to weekly village fetes (thank you, oh, thank you twee and middle class Highgate), any sort of honey should still work very well, but the thickly set stuff is the best. Secondly, sage. Ideally fresh, but even dried sage will do. Chew it with gum or put it in tea. Sage is a brilliant decongestant. I don’t know about anyone else, but in large amounts it also gives me a slightly Zennish feeling, so there is the added bonus of being able to alarm your family and friends with your unnerving aura of calm. I often just combine the two and make tea out of dried sage, stirring in plenty of honey.

This is a really horrible condition. I just want to stamp my feet a lot of the time and have a petulant little sulk at how unfair this all is. I’ve waited months for summer, and now I can’t go outside because the flowers are flocking, Hitchcock-style. I can’t even stay inside because my hayfever is now branching out into the dust mite market, and I need fresh air more and more. I suppose the only alternative is to not breathe at all, or wait until I evolve into some genus of aquatic bathbound homosexual. Or move to Alaska.