Tales from the first year of being married: How to weather the weather...

As you know, I’ve been suffering from Extreme Hay Fever for several weeks now, and I’m currently spending most of my time inside the house with the windows and curtains shut, feeling like a weird Victorian recluse. I imagine the kids on our street passing on rumours about the ‘creepy old witch who only comes out at night’.

I’m exaggerating, of course. I do emerge, blinking, into the daylight now and then like an extra from ‘What We Do In The Shadows’. I am currently only working on Wednesdays so, once a week, I do a quick hobble between the front door and the car, wearing a mask, and then it’s on with the air-con and pollen filter. Yes, I am single-handedly responsible for global warming.

P has taken me out to a few cafes for lunch during the past few weeks, mainly to distract me from raiding the fridge and developing migraines from too much staring at electronic screens. It’s difficult sharing a house with a stir-crazy, summer-loathing nutter. Of course, when we reach the cafes, we have to sit in the stuffy inside areas, and can only look out enviously at the normal people enjoying the sunshine outside, sipping their machiatos right next to flowering pot-plants or beneath trees or in the middle of newly-mown lawns, recklessly ignoring the dangers. 

Yes, I’m still exaggerating: no one drinks machiatos in tea-rooms in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

We’ve even – stupidly, in retrospect – been out for picnics once or twice. Generally, this involves us parking up somewhere with a view, then eating our lunch in the car with the air-con on (I refer you back to my earlier comment regarding global warming). I mean, those hills round the Loxley Valley, one of my favourite places on earth, are literally covered in seeding grass. It’s as if God decided to create a stunningly beautiful bio-pod full of pollen, presumably to punish non-believers. It’s not worth the risk.

Even sitting inside your car can be dangerous. Once, a terrifying-looking bloke with a great deal of unkempt hair ran up to our car and started staring through the windscreen and gesticulating. This is in the middle of nowhere, so where he came from is anyone’s guess. Maybe he was a hobgoblin who lived in the woods. I tried to give him a friendly, placatory smile, while surreptitiously hissing to P ‘Lock the fucking doors! Lock the fucking doors!’. 

One of the problems I have with P is that he always needs a full discussion of the pros and cons of any course of action before he acts. He’s one of those people (ie, a man) who can’t just accept that, when a woman instructs him in a panic-stricken voice to ‘Lock the fucking doors’, it’s advisable to do it first and discuss it later. Once, we were hurtling down the M25 towards a queue of virtually stationary cars – P had been driving for hours and he was, I suspect, half-asleep. He clearly hadn’t realized that the traffic in front had slowed down and the gap between us and the Renault with the little boy looking out of the back window at us was narrowing rapidly. Time slowed down and I remember very clearly thinking about what words I could use to fit into his brain the idea that he needed to brake, urgently, without triggering a terminal debate about it. I still have nightmares about that little boy’s face looming ever closer – I remember wondering how much it would hurt, whether I’d be dead before I registered the pain, and whether if I grabbed the steering wheel we could avoid killing the little boy. We screeched to a halt just in time, and I’ve never felt completely comfortable whenever P drives up behind a vehicle ever since. Anyway, the wild man of the woods decided to sit on a bench right next to our car, making us feel very uncomfortable, and we finally drove off. A win for the wild man, I think.

We did once, on a cooler evening which didn’t seem obviously pollen-laden, spend half an hour in a little picnic area in Lower Bradfield – this place is the Platonic ideal of a picnic area. It looks like it jumped out of an Enid Blyton storybook or a place deep in your childhood memory bank: a stone bridge over a babbling stream with stepping stones across it, shady trees, picnic tables, lots of ducks and geese, the sound of cricket from the nearby cricket pitch, an ice-cream van parked up the road, the Old Schoolroom café across the lane… Half an hour was a long time for me to last before I gave in to the misery and we left.

 

                                    

In the spring, I stupidly filled my garden with flowers, many grown from seed. Stupid, stupid, stupid! The fence pots are filled with lobelia, marigolds, spider plants, campanula, nasturtiums, chives and several things I don’t recognize. There are larger pots on the ground filled with petunias, flowering hebes, a fuchsia, dahlias, geraniums, penstemon, mint, lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage, calendula, some sort of ornamental daisy. Yes, the dandelion-lawn needs mowing. Yes, I have two huge terracotta pots full of bracken which self-seeded but which I leave because I think bracken is beautiful. Yes, I have hogweed and  and cow parsley and rosebay willowherb growing in several other large pots which were intended for tameflowers, so parts of our minuscule garden look like the aftermath of the Blitz. But I like a wild profusion of plants. It looks nice. It encourages wildlife. The last time I ventured into the garden to hang out some washing (I put a peg on my nose which didn’t work), the garden was buzzing with bees and butterflies, and the neighbour’s cat was slinking through the overgrown grass trying to catch a hover fly.

That was, of course, before I stopped hanging out washing because it just gets covered in pollen.

I had dreams of our eating lunch on the patio, beneath the big green umbrella. Of maybe writing poems while sitting on the sun-lounger. Of soaking up some vitamin D while reading my kindle over my morning coffee with the neighbour’s cat on my knee. Of inviting friends round for an informal barbeque. But in fact I can’t even hang out the washing in the sunshine.

 

[Acrylic painting by Louise Wilford]

As the year turns, the hay fever will subside. By September, my favourite month, it will be just a bit of a runny nose, a tickle in my throat. A bloke who recently fitted a new radiator in our bedroom told me he had paid for a steroid injection in his butt which had completely cured the hay fever, he claimed. I read about this treatment online and there are many potential side effects which don’t sound like fun. Also, the radiator engineer said it was his wife’s friend, ‘who worked in a hospital’, who gave him the injection in her own house, which all sounded a bit dodgy to me – I was visualizing, if not a crack house, at least a lack of hygiene and possibly competence.  But, you never know, if the heatwave continues I might decide to give it a go.

Roll on winter!