meish dot org: life, unfolding

Without wanting to sound smug, I’ve never suffered from hayfever. Sorry.

Every year throughout my childhood, my father, sister and brother would be seasonally struck down with red eyes, runny noses, sneezing, drowsiness, all the classic symptoms, while my mum and I would look on, healthy and vaguely bemused. The weirdest thing would be seeing how anti-histamine affected them so differently. Anna, my sister, would pass out almost instantly, while it would turn my big brother David into a speed freak, whizzing around the house like a mad thing.

However your deal with it, hayfever sucks royally, and my heart goes out to anyone who’s stricken down with the sniffles at this time of year – not least because they usually seem to be the people I’d most like to lie around with in the park, or buy flowers for, or roll around with in the hay. Sod’s law, eh?

My brother especially always used to hate me for being healthy in summer. He’d always try and psychosomatically suggest that I had hayfever symptoms, as if to bring them on…”Meg, your eyes are looking awfully red…would you like a tissue?” Never worked, though. I was clear-eyed, sneeze-free and ever-so-slightly smug all summer long. It was worth his resentment, in one respect, if only to get revenge on him for the gale experience, which has since passed into family legend.

My grandparents lived on the Isle of Man, and we’d troop up there from London pretty much every half term, summer, christmas, easter and whatever; every chance we got. We’d make the long journey by train from Euston to Lime Street, then run through Liverpool city centre to the pierhead, where we’d board the IOM Steam Packet Company ship to the island, which took a good six to eight hours, slowly nosing out of the mouth of the Mersey, then into open water, across the Irish Sea to Douglas.

We made that journey so many times, yet each boarding was an adventure – watching the tough leathery old sailors coil the enormous ropes on the foredeck after we cast off; smelling the pungent whiff of kippers in the canteen; watching Liverpool and the Wirral from the railings on the top deck, cowering from the loud blast of the ship’s funnel; feeling the Mersey slide by (and to quote Alex Glasgow, though he was talking about the Tyne, …the seagulls cry, the ships lie safe and silent at the riverside..). Once we hit open sea, there was more to explore – thundering up and down the metal stairs that linked the floors, hunting out our cabin (if we had one, which we usually didn’t); sitting on the enormous capstans at the bow and stern; investigating the lifeboats and watching the silver wake we left behind, seagulls following, effortless.

One year, we made the journey in late October, overnight. My mum booked a cabin, because the forecast was bad for the crossing. We didn’t know how bad it would be. As we headed into open water, the swell picked up along with the wind, and soon we found ourselves in the middle of a force ten gale, a metal cork, bobbing on the waves at half power and every possible angle.

I was nine. In the years since then I’ve discovered that I actually have very good sea-legs – it’s just a question of fixing on the horizon, relaxing your mind and allowing your body to ride it out. But back then, my legs buckled under me, just like my mum and my sister. I went out to be sick over the rail at the edge of the ship, and the wind blew it right back into my face. My brother laughed like a drain.

The three of us, mum, sister and I, were thoroughly ill – the constant churning motion of the ship combined with the smell of oil and metal and ozone and kippers in the dark combined to make a pungent emetic. We lay in the cabin, puking our guts up and feeling like grim death. My brother, meanwhile, aged 11, pouted in perfect health and told us we were being boring. Little bastard.

Tell me about a childhood journey (to school, on holiday, to your grandparents house…anything…) or tell me about how much hayfever sucks.