Hay fever
I wish I was talking about the Noel Coward play.* SNEEZE. I’m sitting here thinking, I didn’t bring this SNEEZE on by saying last night sneeze that tea at the Ritz SNEEZE was like being a character in a Noel Coward play, S-N-E-E-Z-E, did I (sneeze)?
When I was younger, and even more of a loose cannon than I am now, I had true killer hay fever, the kind that eventually would kill you, when your head exploded, if you hadn’t died already of the brain damage caused by banging your brain against the inside of your skull every time you sneezed violently. You really can feel mugged by a paroxysm. Added to this was the interesting fact that I was allergic to (apparently) all the hay fever drugs out there, both the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. It’s especially insulting to have hives or a headache or a stomachache or space-cadet-itis or dizziness or what-have-you and still have your hay fever. I had interesting summers for many years. Hay fever is one of the reasons I moved back to Maine, because I could just about bear the pollen count up there.** Although I spent a lot of my Maine summers . . . wait for it . . . in Manhattan. I had a severe Tourist Avoidance complex. Most tourists*** are afraid of Manhattan summer weather, which is sensible of them, and they all run off to Maine. The pollen count in Manhattan was mostly bearable too, so long as I didn’t hang out in Central Park a lot.
When one talks about the mental derangement of moving three thousand miles and over a national border to marry someone one has known for a weekend, the quality of one’s hay fever doesn’t usually come into it. But in fact I think I was a lot more nuts to do it when I knew how bad my hay fever was than anything about Peter, who was obviously a fine upstanding sober responsible British citizen and not an axe murderer†. And the first few years . . . well. I’m not entirely joking about brain damage. And then local honey††, homeopathy, and middle age††† began to take the edge off.
Today has been a highly undesirable return to previous form. And I know it’s my own fault: I took a wrong turn with the hellhounds and we found ourselves walking along the edge of a field that puffed up great clouds of pollen with every step. Oh dear. And furthermore I have been slack about local honey this year because of the freaking calories. Next year I’ll just have to get fat.
SNEEZE. And I haven’t even told you about the nettle rash. Hey, I have a riding lesson tomorrow. . . .
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* http://www.enotes.com/hay-fever in case you’re interested. I’m pretty sure I have read this and have not seen it staged, but I can’t remember why it’s called Hay Fever. Possibly the mad Bliss family have been driven mad by the insanity of their sinuses.
** My worst weeks tended to overlap with the black fly season, which sort of got the yearly hell over with in one swell foop. I was also allergic to black-fly bites. I stayed indoors a lot.
*** Not all–by no means all. I know this very well, because I have the sort of face that out of towners think looks harmless enough to ask directions of. Sometimes they even ask me something I can answer. I mean accurately.
Of course I’m living in yet another tourist mecca here in the south of England. I stop moving my lips when I talk during the summer here, which makes my accent less identifiable, and clerks are less inclined to try to help me with the money, which I find really annoying. I also try not to sound too American when American tourists ask me directions: the last thing you want, when you’re a tourist, and revelling in all the strangeness, is to find yourself talking to someone from home. I know. Back in my tourist days I had my ears pierced at Harrods so I could say I did for the rest of my life . . . and the young woman who did it was from Boston. I was living twenty miles outside Boston at the time myself.
† And only charmingly eccentric. Mostly.
†† Very, very, very local honey. Anyone out there who’s tried the eating-local-honey-to-cure-hay-fever trick and it’s been a bust, it’s possible that you either didn’t start early enough in the year (February at latest here in the Northern Hemisphere) or your honey wasn’t local enough. Hampshire honey did nothing. Honey from the beekeeper next door worked a treat.
††† Some day I’ll post the entry I wrote about Getting Old. Mostly it’s a ratbag. There are bright spots. One of them is the possibility that your hay fever will start to wear out its youthful exuberance.