Yesterday my personal hayfever season began.

As far as my records can tell me, this is actually the latest in the year it's ever started. I've always tended to get it later than most people (with the annoying effect that every year I wonder if I'm going to get away without it, and am always disappointed), but as far as my records can tell me it seems to have been getting gradually later and later over the past decade. Around 1998-2000 it was starting in late June or early July; in 2004-2005 it was more like late July; and now it seems to be mid-August.

(My ‘records’, admittedly, are the archives of this diary since it started in 1998, and since I never expected to be doing this sort of retrospective analysis I haven't been recording every single hayfever attack or anything like that. But when I do mention it in here it's usually because it's become irritating enough to complain about; so while the absence of a complaint by a particular date might not prove my hayfever hadn't started, I think the presence of one can reasonably show that it had. So this somewhat unscientific means of measurement wouldn't be adequate to prove it if my hayfever were starting earlier than usual, but I think it's valid to conclude that it's starting later.)

My hayfever has often seemed to me to start later than I expected, and so I tend to spend the early and middle parts of the summer hoping against hope that I might get away without it this year. I had assumed this was simply because I was stupidly optimistic and could never quite remember when it was supposed to start; but if it has actually been starting later each year then perhaps it's not such a silly thing to have thought after all.

(Mind you, this year might be a bit of a freak; as someone pointed out to me yesterday, July was so wet that it might easily have had a noticeable effect on pollen patterns.)