My 13-year-old son hates autumn, winter and early spring – anything that isn’t shorts weather – and he keeps up a constant drumbeat of how insufficient the British climate is to his sunshine needs and all the places he’ll be more likely to live when he’s older, such as California. Then, for about two hours at the start of June, he’s happy. And then he gets hay fever. It was years before I really believed in it. I thought it was like when people say they have an allergy when really they are on a diet. I definitely remember, when I was a kid, that it was just something you said for an extra 15 minutes on your exam times.
More years passed before it entered my parental toolkit, and I could reliably put my hands on a packet of antihistamines every day. My learning curve veered sharply upwards the year I had to take him to A&E because he couldn’t breathe, and that was hay fever – particularly since, on the same day, my daughter had broken her foot and I thought it was a sprain. So I was back in A&E a day later, having to explain why hay fever was higher up my list of emergencies than broken bones. Trampolines and pollen shot up my risk register over this period.
This year, it is unbelievably bad, and everyone has it. We’re in a constant cycle of lateral flow tests because the Delta variant is apparently very like hay fever, yet nobody in the family has Covid and everybody’s still sneezing. Mr Z, who also had hay fever when he was young, is on a constant research jag, and wanders around dispensing advice that graduates from useless to worse than useless. “It gets a lot better after you’re 40,” he said at one point. “That doesn’t help,” replied my seething, and also quite nasal, first-born. Then it was: “I used to make it go away with a really cold pint of fizzy lager.” “Yeah, that doesn’t help either.”
We also read that you could cure it with sex, but decided, tactfully for once, not to mention it.
