No more tears of the sun

For most of the city, the magnificent sunny weekend just gone was the year's first glorious intimation of summer. But for some of us - the hay fever sufferers - it marked the onset of something rather less auspicious: the beginning of a very long season of Allergy Hell.

Unless you have experienced hay fever yourself, it's hard to sympathise with the people who suffer from it. It's not just that they look so revolting - the hideous, bloodshot eyes; the red nose; all that snuffling and dripping. Nor that they insist on wheeling out their killjoy symptoms on precisely those wondrous sunny days when the rest of the world is busy trying to have fun.

No, what is really infuriating about hay fever victims is their endless whingeing. To hear them bang on about it, you'd think they had something genuinely serious, like flu.

But the truth about hay fever is that it is indeed quite a lot like flu.

Not the version that lays you low in bed for a week with a blinding headache and aching limbs, but something possibly nastier: an affliction which lasts much longer (from now until the end of September); which makes you feel nearly as dreadful (the near-constant sneezing, especially, can become so debilitating that you feel like death); but which doesn't get you even a day off work because it is not considered a proper illness, just a little allergy.

I know this because until late last year I was a sufferer myself and it ruined almost every summer I can remember. Even now when I hear the sound of a lawnmower, when I smell freshly mown grass, when I imagine a picnic in June, I'm incapable of thinking happy thoughts: for me, it's all too painfully associated with sodden handkerchiefs, red-raw eyes and endless sneezing.

Hay fever, or seasonal allergic rhinitis, is an allergic reaction to airborne substances such as pollen that get into the upper respiratory passages - the nose, sinuses, throat - and also the eyes.

About one in seven of us has some of the symptoms and they usually start, like mine did, in early childhood. The most common causes of hay fever are tree pollen such as elder, elm, hazel and especially birch (spring hay fever), grass pollen (summerhay fever), mugwort and hybrids such as chrysanthemum (autumn hay fever) and house-dust mites.

With such a confusing array of symptoms and "cures" it's been something of a quest of mine to discover the perfect remedy. One year, at school, I thought I had found it: an injection which immunised you for a whole season. Unfortunately, when I asked for it the following year, the school doctor wouldn't give to me. Apparently, medical opinion had since decided that it was too risky.

Personally, I would happily have taken the slight risk of death-by-adverse-reaction in return for the certainty of a sneeze-free summer. As it was, I had to make do with those antihistamine tablets which you have to take every day and which work pretty well (except when the pollen count is really high), but which mean you spend your whole summer in a slightly drugged, drowsy fug.

Over the years I've tried plenty of other methods. I've tried avoiding dairy products and honey (useless, and also very annoying if, like me, you live on cheese, milk and honey); I've tried those homeopathic pills that you suck (fine, provided you take them in conjunction with heavy-duty medical antihistamines); and I've even tried going abroad to places - such as the Sudanese desert - unafflicted by English pollen (quite effective, but not desperately practical).

Then, last year, I chanced upon the Holy Grail - a bizarre alternative remedy that has been the only thing that's worked for me in the long term. I must confess to a certain scepticism about these sorts of things, but a wonderful north London clinical homeopath, Fiona Gross, has convinced me that sometimes the drugs don't work.

Now, my summer relies upon a special hay fever allergy pack made by a homeopathic laboratory in Wales, Ffynnonwen Homeopathic Remedies. It comes in a dinky green box comprising two or three (depending on your range of allergies) phials of liquid which you have to drop under your tongue twice daily. One week you might take the mixed-pollens remedy; the next, the mixed-grasses remedy; the third week the one for tree pollen (the main cause of allergic reactions at this time of year). They are a huge bore to use because you're not supposed to eat or drink for half an hour either side of your dose, and you keep forgetting. But I promise you, it's worth the effort.

Now hang on, you might be thinking. What about the TV programme last year that said what a massive con homeopathy was; the one that made the point that homeopathic tinctures are diluted to such a ridiculous degree that there is no way the supposed active ingredient can have any possible effect?

If this is your concern, I must say I sympathise. I too found that view hugely persuasive. All I can say is that however unscientific homeopathy may be in theory, in practice it worked for me. The sceptic in me didn't want it to, I promise.

The clincher was last year's Glastonbury Festival. In previous years, spending three days camping in a grassy bowl in the middle of Somerset at the peak of the pollen season took a dreadful toll and only by dosing myself up with copious quantities of antihistamines, nasal sprays, eye drops and disposable tissues could I survive.

Last year, though, I barely needed any of them. Though the homeopathic remedies hadn't cured me completely - you need to take them for two years to develop full immunity - they had reduced my symptoms to an extraordinary degree.

You might argue, I suppose, that it's all in the mind; that deep down, for all my pretend metropolitan sophistication, I am in fact a pathetic, yoghurtweaving, tree-hugging hippie who so wanted to believe this snake-oil cure would work that it actually did. And if that's the case, that's fine by me. The point is I took the potions in that little green box and now I'm very cured.

Quite how it worked, I couldn't care less.

Fiona Gross can be contacted on 020 8346 9166. Ffynnonwen Homeopathic Remedies: 01974 241376.