My flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo left at 10.30 in the morning and went via Tai Pei. Unfortunately, I just could. Not. Sleep. I lay awake trying to doze off pretty much all goddamn bloody night, turned the air-con on, turned the air-con off again, had this dull headache-y feeling that just wouldn’t go away, and felt generally like ass. I must have dozed off briefly though, because when I finally opened my eyes to FG2s alarm going off, I realized there was something odd happening, they weren’t opening properly. As it turns out this is because my eyelids were puffed out like ping pong balls and looked utterly ridiculous. I put this down to not sleeping enough, took some painkillers and had tea with the fabulous FG2 before she went to work. I then finished packing, got my shit together, and headed for my flight. Hong Kong has a truly marvelous feature, which is that you can check in your luggage in the main station before you take the train to the airport, something that all major cities should most definitely adopt as it is made of win. Having divested myself of my cumbersome baggage I then made my way to the airport train, feeling slightly odd, but not unwell enough to think anything of it.

As I boarded the plane I noticed that my wrists had a strange looking rash on them which I could have sworn hadn’t been there a few hours previously. This became slightly more alarming in Taipei where I noticed it had morphed into a solid red lump on each arm and become rather itchy, and about half an hour before we landed in Tokyo I woke from a snooze to discover that it now speckled all of my arms, and from the feeling of most of my upper body had made it to my torso. At this point, I was forced to acknowledge that I was having a full-blown allergic reaction, and that it was getting worse. Not only this, but I had it leaving china, source of half the world’s potential pandemics in the last several years. Nothing engenders paranoia like someone leaving china looking like they have early stage leprosy. In fact if this had never happened before I would have been pretty damn freaked out myself. Fortunately, I am familiar with this one.

I am allergic to a variety of things. Most of these are stupid and easily avoidable – bubble bath, certain types of fabric softener, aniseed. Some of them are more serious – I am heinously allergic to penicillin for example. Yet more of them are the subject of some uncertainty – certain additives in food colouring which I haven’t narrowed down really, a few types of sweetener. I very rarely come across the latter in the EU because EU law covering food additives is fairly restrictive, and frankly I rarely come across them in the US because I don’t eat the kind of crappy sweets the US generally has to offer. This particular reaction has only happened once before when I was 16, and I had to eat about 15 packets of M&Ms to induce it (yes, 15. I really liked m&ms and I have a tendency to over-do things)

In any case, I was in neither the EU nor the US, I was in China, a country that sells cartons of milk that say “made with real milk” on the side. In fact I am fairly certain the milk in my tea that morning and the previous night was the perpetrator of my blotchiness, but despite the fact that it had been about 12 hours, things continued to worsen. By the time I had gotten through customs (while hiding my arms and trying to look healthy) I could tell it was all over my legs too. By the time I finally found Cheese (the person, not the delicious foodstuff) and went back to the hotel (a tale in its own right) my entire skin was one huge red lump. It was everywhere. My face, my neck, my feet, even the palms of my hands. I felt cold but my skin was on fire, I had a fever, and I was in fucking agony. I had been working myself into a rage at Cheese for ludicrous airport based inefficiency, but I was incredibly glad he was there, because he found a 24 hour pharmacy and got me the antihistamines without which I think I might have thrown myself off our 18^th floor balcony rather than continue to scratch my own skin off.

So kids, the moral of the story is: do not drink the milk in China. Of course, Cheese entirely disagrees with this theory, and claims that it is perfectly obvious that I am merely allergic to communism.  Which I suppose would be kind of cool.