Summer has set in with its usual severity

There's only one thing worse than an otherwise-healthy person complaining about back pain, and that's an otherwise-healthy person complaining about hay fever as well.

For me, the joy that the passing of winter and the onset of spring bring is short lived.

Much like the people of Leeds, who take the first glimpse of the sun a trumpet call ordering them to go out wearing as little as possible – within days of the annual six months of guaranteed gloom coming to an end, every plant in the UK is belching out its filthy spores.

And every year, I forget this fact during the winter and long for the days when the only time I spend outdoors (going to and from work) will not be conducted under cover of darkness.

As soon as they arrive, I am incapacitated by a host of respiratory problems that would put an inbred bulldog with the flu to shame.  

Apparently 12 million people in this country suffer from hay fever, and conventional wisdom seems to be that this figure is constantly rising. Certainly, year after year more of my friends and family who had never experienced hay fever before say that they've got it now.

Maybe that's just to shut me up and rebuff my demands for sympathy. I don't know.

I've had it since I was about seven years old when a friend and I hacked a rotten tree stump to pieces (that was how children entertained themselves in early 1980s Suffolk – incredible, innit?). My eyes blew up to the size and colour of tennis balls, I was rushed to hospital, issued with eye drops and nasal spray and I haven't looked back.

So I know what I'm talking about.

For once.

Still, predictable as its appearance is, hay fever never ceases to surprise me with its innovations.

In the last couple of years, I have started to come out in a rash on my legs if I walk through long grass in shorts. At this rate, by the time I'm 50, I won't be able to think about plants without my throat caving in and suffocating me from anaphylactic shock.

I realise that my previous excursions into palaeobiology have been somewhat controversial, but surely the only threats posed to our primitive ancestors from the vegetable kingdom were:

• Trees falling on them
• Falling out of trees
• Things and people falling out of trees onto them
• Assault by hostile plant-based life forms from other planets (eg triffids, pod people, Audrey 2 etc)

Grass, flowers and shrubs, then, have always been justly regarded as Mostly Harmless.

Unless - as the underlying implication in most commentary on the matter seems to be - people are just getting more feeble over time, it is reasonable to assume that people have suffered with hay fever throughout history.

However, the only instance I can find (from five minutes of Googling, which is what passes for research here at ODHSNM) of hay fever playing any significant role in historical events is as follows.

In 1925, Werner Heisenberg had a really bad bout and he went to Heligoland by the sea to recover.

Getting away from quantum pain-in-the-arse Niels Bohr for a few weeks gave him the opportunity to write "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen" – which set the foundations for matrix mechanics and gave us the Uncertainty Principle. Which is something to do with science.

That's it. And he could have been planning on going on holiday anyway.

So, this is by way of an appeal. Let's uncover the hidden history of allergies and prove that we're not just modern weaklings. I want to know that Henry V sneezed his way through Agincourt; that Christopher Columbus came out in a nasty rash within hours of setting foot in the Americas; and that Julius Caesar didn't see Brutus coming because he was rubbing his itching eyes like a crazy person.    

Any takers? Meanwhile, here's the...

Postscript: I was going to call this article "Summertime and the living is sneezy" but Google returns 54,500 results for this particular pun.