Hayfever, or The Placebo Effect

I have a plan for this weekend. The decaying, overrun garden we inherited when we bought our house was is to be turfed . The rampant bamboo that I thought was hiding a panda colony has been cut down and the old fish pond has been filled in.

It will be a triumph, even the threat of the British weather is not going to dissuade me. Then I remembered the curse of the summertime, the terrible affliction that stops me enjoying beer gardens and barbecues. The lamest illness in the world.

Hayfever.

Effectively this means I am bought low by flowers, the tiny pretty little things that are easily stomped underfoot. I am a Goliath bought down by grass, or even worse I’m like all those people in that M Knight Shamalamadingdong movie. Not the good dead people one, but the one where the trees did it.

This means during the summer I have two options, I can either claw out my eyes as though I had just seen medusa coming towards me or hermit myself inside the house. So I become like Bilbo expecting the Sacksville-Baggins’ and close all the windows and doors.

Thereby turning my home into a greenhouse. It is the realisation of jumping from the frying pan into a fire, at least in a thermostatic way. Pleas from people to just open a little window is met with a scream of “No, you’ll kill me”

That may be a tad dramatic, but as an asthmatic having hayfever is just a way to set off an attack. It’s as though plants are trying to plan the perfect murder.

“It wasn’t us guv’nor, honest, so there may be a little pollen round his nostrils but he died from being strangled by his airwaves. We only have leaves how could we do that?”

I don’t even understand why vegetation has a vendetta against me. If I was a rampant fruit eater then I could understand, but I am a friend of the plant world. I try to only eat meat (and therefore help save the grass) but you don’t see me getting an allergy to bacon.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Placebo Effect.”

If you could create a painless, inexpensive cure for a single ailment, what would you cure and why?