You’re nothing these days if you haven’t an allergic reaction to something. Declaring you’re lactose intolerant is guaranteed to grant you celebrity status – you’ll be up there with the Kardashians. Everything from goat’s milk to beetroot causes people to break out in a myriad of rashes and make them sneeze like a hyena. I don’t want to make light of the serious discomfort many people suffer, but I’m inclined to believe that certain individuals like to carry allergies around like fashion items.

The Mother claims I have allergic reactions to a variety of things: like going to bed before midnight, getting up before 10 and doing a day’s work. She also thinks I have a physical reaction leaving the pub before anyone else.

“You have to be the last one out,” she says. “You break out in hives if you think anyone had more porter than you.”

I suppose the word allergy is used to cover a multitude of reactions. For instance, I am told that fellas like me are allergic to marriage. That couldn’t be true because I’ve had no direct experience of the institution, despite a few near-misses in my time.

We were talking about the phenomenon of allergies in the local hostelry a few nights ago and Cantillon dismissed the whole thing as a modern fad.

“Years ago,” says he, “there was no such thing as an allergic reaction to anything. We drank milk straight from the cow, we ate bacon that was hanging in cobwebs for months and drank water from watering holes that we shared with herds of four-legged creatures. How we are alive at all is a miracle.”

Before I’m accused of peddling pub talk, let me say that I, more than most, know that every word one hears in a licensed premises isn’t gospel. If I took seriously the advice on health and well-being I got at this side of the pub counter, I reckon I’d be at the other side of the great abyss by now, where allergies would be the least of my worries.

In my time, I’ve listened to treatises on the benefits of smoking 40 fags a day, drinking at least five pints a night and having a greasy fry every morning for the breakfast.

My late friend Dixie Ryan was a great exponent of this lifestyle. Hence he is the late Dixie Ryan. He fell into the clutches of his cousin and undertaker, Tinky, far earlier than he should have.

Dixie put everything down to our location on the planet and our climatic conditions. Because we live in a wet, cold climate he believed we needed insulation and sustenance in the form of fat, food and alcohol. He regarded tobacco as a drug of consolation that would keep us from going mad “under these unrelenting grey skies, with their incessant rain and a cold that drills itself into the marrow”.

Poor auld Dixie didn’t need allergies; the pint, the frying pan and the fags swept him without their help.

It’s just as well Dixie departed this life when he did, he wouldn’t have survived the smoking ban and certainly the emergence of men in lycra whizzing around the roads on bikes would have driven him into a home for the bewildered. No doubt, he would have blamed the current outbreak of allergies on the demise of the fry, the reduction in alcohol intake and the lack of nicotine in the blood stream.

While I myself am not allergic to much, I have a bad reaction to certain things. One thing that triggers a disgust in me that borders on nausea is the habit some individuals have of publicly and loudly breaking wind. Excuses are often made for the practitioners of this art and allergies are often blamed for their flatulence, I’m a firm believer that people who break wind noisily and publicly suffer from a poor sense of time and place rather than an allergy of any kind.

And it is not just the audible windbreakers that have an adverse affect on me. Other culprits include the purveyors of the silent, but deadly emission. Up to the institution of the smoking ban these people escaped unnoticed.

Indeed, from the moment Sir Walter Raleigh lit his first leaf, the habit of inhaling burning tobacco quickly took hold in alehouse and hostelry, and for centuries masked the smell of foul air. Since Miceál Martin banished the weed, the windbreakers and their pongs have been exposed.

Our local publican, Tom Walshe, recently opened a smoking annex, a three-sided perspex structure with a roof. I suggested he should put up a notice saying the gazebo is intended not only for the inhalation of smoke, but also for the expulsion of foul air.

“Indeed,” he said, as he scribbled a note to himself. “This facility is specially designed for those with a volcanic reaction to good porter.”