My pollen allergy flew in from the leftfield when I was a teenager, and I felt like I had been flattened by a truck. A late spring evening ‘jaunt’ landed me in A&E, where nurses pumped me full of enough antihistamine to reduce the golf-ball swelling in my eyes.

It got worse after that. I became the girl who’d spend summer with a trail of well-fingered tissues in my wake, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. Spring would signal the start of my enduring relationship with my Salbutamol inhaler and I’d roll fistfuls of organic hay fever supplements around my tongue like chewing tobacco. Antihistamines rarely helped – unless I wanted to plod through life like a zombie with a lobotomy – and so damage control became key: brightening eye drops in my handbag, a pair of scratched sunglasses to be worn on the Tube, loo roll, loo roll everywhere (up sleeves, in the tops of socks, squirrelled away in bra padding). I even had hay fever on my wedding day, and distinctly remember pondering whether or not it was ‘the done thing’ to use my gypsophila bouquet to dab at my streaming nose.

And this year? This year my hay fever is seemingly on steroids. Which judging by the raft of bleary-eyed, sneezing, sorry-looking city-dwellers around me, is the case for many of us this year. So what exactly is this fresh hell? Why are we suffering so much? And what, oh what, can we do about it?

Why more of us are suffering from hay fever than ever before