Except that, throughout the summer, the picture would have been spoiled because my eyes would have been streaming and my nose would have been the colour of Cream of Tomato soup, the condensed kind.

As each month without an R in it popped up on the calendar, I'd be struck down with hay fever.

Looking back, I can remember days when, because of the hay fever, I had to stay in when Mr Page next door mowed his lawn; I even had to stay in when Mr Marsden two doors down mowed his lawn. During viciously extreme pollen days, I had to stay indoors when a bloke three streets away thought about mowing his lawn. I'm exaggerating, but you get the drift.

Everything I looked at became like an impressionist painting and, years later, looking at some Van Goghs in a gallery in Amsterdam, I worked the whole thing out: he wasn't a lonely genius. Well, may be he was: remember Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life? He just had hay fever, which meant that he saw things in a blurry way. Simple.

And then, over the years as I grew into a man and the corduroy shorts were consigned to the dustbin of history – well, the dustbin – the hay fever started to get better.

My mother told me I would grow out of it and, indeed, I did. As I got to my forties and fifties, my eyes stopped running and my nose stopped dripping like a tap and my eyes stayed crystal clear.

There were occasional bad years, but the trend was positive; I still can't go into a house with a dog or a cat in it without sneezing for several days afterwards and wheezing like a broken bandoneon, but at least the pollen-driven hay fever is a thing of the past.

Or at least I thought it was. This year, for some reason that I can't work out, the hay fever is back. And, as they say in cinema trailers, this time it means business.

I'm not sure why it's returned, because it's not been a particularly dry summer, but I wish you could see me now. Or rather, I'm glad you can't, particularly if you're having your breakfast.

I'm sneezing on average every six seconds. These aren't little sneezettes, either, of the sort a Jane Austen heroine might puff into a tiny kerchief at the end of a chapter.

No, these are seismically gargantuan explosions that almost blow my face off the front of my head. I can feel them coming and I try to control them through sheer brute willpower. Yeah, right. HAAAAAAAACHA! and off I go again. I mop my face with one of my dad's old handkerchiefs, a vast one the size of a vest.

I try using tissues but they're absolutely useless for the kind of sneezes I do, even the so-called Man Size tissues. They crumple instantly into tiny bits of blotting paper and I'm left with morsels
of tissue all over my chin. I look like a bloke who's cut himself
shaving or somebody going to a fancy-dress party as a zombie with a peeling face.

In a wicked hay fever variation (and that's wicked in the old sense, not the new sense, man) only one of my eyes is running. It's not only running, it's somehow drooping, and when I wake up in the morning it's stuck closed so that I think I've gone partly blind.

Only the hay fever sufferer can know the true agony of the condition, of course. It's like a bad back; people always think you're putting it on, at least a little bit.

True, they can see you sneezing, and they can hear you sneezingfrom at least one county away, but they say, "Well, it's only a sneeze: come and help cut thegrass" or "Come and gambol in this meadow".

I'd rather not gambol in the meadow, thanks. I'd rather go to the bathroom and get at least 15 sheets of that family-size super-absorbent kitchen roll and pour cool refreshing water on to them, and place the sheets over my eyes like you might put a blanket over a fire.

Then I'd like to lie on the bathroom floor with the curtains shut, if that's all right with you.

The one consolation is that I'm not wearing corduroy shorts.