Tales of a newly-wed: Who likes gardens, anyway?

 I have hay fever. I’m not alone. According to the internet, around 13 million people in the UK suffer from it – that’s around one in every five or six people.

But, of course, my hay fever is much, much worse than everyone else’s…

I’ve suffered from hay fever since childhood, along with allergies to books, dust and some animals. I’ve been taking daily antihistamines for decades. If I stop taking them, the allergies become impossible to manage, but the antihistamine tablets don’t get rid of all the symptoms. They simply dampen them down a bit - though this summer they don’t seem to be dampening them down much. 

This is why I got married in December.

I’m currently reduced to sitting inside with all external doors and windows shut, a pile of tissue boxes on one side of me and a waste-bin on the other (to put the used tissues in), nasal spray and eye-drops within arm’s reach. Every so often I wipe my face down with a dampened bit of kitchen paper to remove any stray bits of pollen (and the accumulated snot and tears). It makes me feel a tiny bit better for a few moments, but is probably pointless.

            I’m trying not to move or talk too much because moving and talking makes the symptoms worse. It’s a good job I’m not teaching much at the moment. Or maybe the kids wouldn’t notice the difference.

              Hay fever is generally considered to be a ‘trivial’ condition. You don’t get much genuine sympathy from people as it isn’t life-threatening, and it’s very boring being around sufferers. I mean, no one wants to spend much time with someone who keeps sneezing into their beer, blowing their nose with a noise like an elephant at a watering-hole, sniffling, coughing and moaning, and who can’t go outside to enjoy the sun that everyone else sees as a ‘good thing’.

If you don’t suffer from hay fever, it’s difficult to appreciate how bloody miserable it is.  At this moment, I have itchy, swollen, runny eyes, a nose that is running like a tap but simultaneously blocked, an itchy sore throat, dry mouth, itchy ears, a sinus headache. I keep having random bouts of uncontrollable loud sneezes that just go on and on and on. I just ate an ice lolly which cooled me down and made me feel for a few blissful minutes like I was taking part in British Summer Time, though I shouldn’t be eating sugar due to the pre-diabetes. Anyway, the sniffling returned as soon as I’d taken the final bite. I mean, how much mucus can one set of sinuses actually produce? It’s no wonder hay fever makes you feel dehydrated.

And to make things worse, I can see what feels like everyone else in the world, outside, enjoying the sunshine. I keep imagining passers-by coming up to the window, dressed in their shorts and t-shirts, tanned and cheerful, peering in at my vampire-pale face, red-rimmed eyes and damp red nose, and sticking out their tongues and going ‘Na na na!’. 

I also suffer from light sensitivity. I’ve always had a terrible habit of keeping my left eye shut all the time unless I keep reminding myself to open it. Oh, the number of photos I ruined as a child by having one eye shut and the other squinting! These days, I try to wear sunglasses outdoors whenever the light levels are even just a little above Britain’s usual greyness, which leads to people telling me to stop trying to act ‘cool’ (if only!). We live in the middle house of a terrace of three, and our patio windows in the living room face north-west, so our living room is very dark at the best of times (we often have to put the lights on in the daytime) but the sunshine streaming through the windows still gives me visual disturbances. When P draws the curtains, he never shuts them fully – I think men are specially trained to leave curtains with an inch-wide gap, so they can keep their eye out for potential intruders – and he creates a kind of intensifying effect, narrowing the aperture through which the sun can shine in one intense beam, straight into my eyes. I’m sitting at the dark end of the living room at this moment, but I’m still screwing up my eyes against the glare and seeing glowing zigzags in front of my eyes (I keep going back to correct typos but I apologise for any that get past me). I’m considering shutting the curtains, but it feels like cutting myself off from the outside world even more.

I triggered the hay fever this morning by foolishly going into the garden to hang out a few towels to dry. That was all it took. Hay fever is a bit like a toddler or an internet troll – once triggered, it’s very difficult to calm it down again. Yesterday, the neighbour’s cat, who visits us daily, triggered it by maliciously being cute and encouraging me to stroke her. I assume she was well-coated in pollen, as she spends a lot of time slinking between the flower-pots in my garden, and I guess I transferred this motherlode onto my hand – from where it was a small step to my nose (which sounds like a new yoga pose).

I expect you’re wondering why someone with bad hay fever has put pots full of flowers in their garden. Well, earlier in the year, I forgot I wasn’t like other people and I had the crazy idea that it would be lovely to try to make our tiny garden into a little oasis of calm in which we could sit on sunny days. We have a table out there with an umbrella, and we used to eat out there quite often when we first lived here. You see, though I developed allergies as a child, they were much more under control during my thirties and forties, and I could live more or less like a normal person. We could sit outside during the occasional hour of sunshine our garden gets, the only thing putting us off being our next door neighbour’s CCTV camera which scans across our garden towards the garages (for good reasons) and makes us feel self-conscious.

But then my hay fever got worse, and I’ve always hated gardening, so for several years I got rid of the pots of flowers, stopped mowing the lawn and rarely ventured out there. However, a couple of years ago, I got mad about this and decided I was as entitled to have a pretty garden as anyone else.  I painted the fence panel that replaced the one that blew down in a storm, I bought pots that hang off the fence, and grew marigolds and calendula and nasturtiums from seed, took spiderlings from my indoor spider plants and grew them to put in some of the hanging pots, took trips to the garden centre to buy new pots and pretty flowers to put in them. I repainted the wooden garden table, checked the table umbrella for spiders, pulled up the uglier of the wild plants that had taken root in our largest pots – I left the bracken which looks incredible.

Yes, while I did all this, I had some hay fever symptoms, but it was bearable.

So now the garden looks better than it has for years. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t as nice as the gardens on pictures posted on Facebook by members of various groups I belong to, but by my standards it’s nice enough. P even mowed the lawn, which I’m sure pleased our neighbours but which made me a bit sad as I actually liked it looking like a meadow full of bees. The grass, which was lush and rich-green before, now looks bone-dry and unhappy, but that’s what comes of bowing to peer pressure. Anyway, I now have a little garden suitable for sitting out in – but the hay fever’s so bad now, I can’t even open the patio doors!

All I can do now is stare out at P, through the glass, while he sits in one of our two garden chairs, beer in hand, and completes chess challenges on his phone, and think of days gone by…