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When I was 19, I started getting these weird heat rashes.

Every day, whenever I got hot, these debilitating, paralysing heat rashes would envelop me. Burning, bumpy, red weals suddenly covered my body. So itchy—you wanted to scratch everywhere, though scratching brought no relief. Once the rash started, there was nothing I could do. I just had to wait for it to pass, which would take about half an hour.

I didn’t even have to get so hot that I broke sweat for the rash to come on. Just walking briskly would do it, getting flustered, wearing a layer too many, even having a shower.

And it came every day, usually mid-morning.

I thought it might be stress that was causing it, but it was the other way around: these rashes were causing the stress.

I found a way of coping with it: do intense exercise every morning and actually induce the rash. Then it seemed to burn itself out for the rest of the day.

But the next morning, it would be back again.

I went to see doctors about it. None of them knew what it was. As GPs often do when they don’t know the answer, they brushed it aside, “Oh, it’s probably stress.” I wasn’t making this up! But unless I actually had an attack in front of the GP, there was no way of showing them what it was.

I saw a dermatologist, who gave me anti-depressants. I saw Chinese herbalist after Chinese herbalist, who all concocted these disgusting teas for me to drink. Lord knows what damage I did to my liver drinking that stuff. I saw an acupuncturist who declared brightly that he could cure it. But he couldn’t.

It made my life a nightmare, because you never quite knew when the rash was going to hit. What if it came on when I was on stage? During that all-important meeting? When I was with a girl I liked? It was a source of acute embarrassment.

The condition disappeared, bizarrely, if I went to the tropics. Why, Lord knows. But as soon as I got home, back it came.

Then I noticed the condition also disappeared in the summer. What was that about? I realised the antihistamine I was taking for hay fever also prevented these rash attacks.

But I didn’t want to take antihistamine every day—that couldn’t be healthy—so, once the hay fever season was over, I would go back to keeping it at bay by trying to do intense exercise every morning and burning it off.

When I got married and had kids, aged 30, this became impossible, so I resigned myself to daily antihistamine. This started with Clarityn (Loratadine), moved onto Zirtek (which I hated because if I drank alcohol, I used to get incredibly drunk and that led to a lot of bad decisions and mistakes) and, eventually, Xyzal, which I found I only needed to take every other day. The potential long-term damage of sustained anti-histamine use was a gamble I was prepared to make to avoid the daily nightmare of this condition.

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Eventually, I discovered that the problem I had was a condition called

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