All this summer I’ve been hiding a guilty secret. I hardly dare mention it, but I love the rain. This summer’s gloom has been disastrous for the roses, the potatoes, the haymaking. The floods have been disastrous, but my headaches have benefited. It’s been a good year for the migraine.

Most people’s idea of a perfect summer would include sitting in the sun with a glass of wine. For me, however, bright sunshine and alcohol trigger my migraines, so summer is a bummer. A migraine is a bit like a deathbed: the bedroom must be silent and dark as a tomb: I can’t move, sleep, speak or eat. It’s three days of severe pain, vomiting and the faint whisper of the BBC World Service under my pillow. I don’t like to boast, but I think that if migraine was an Olympic event I’d make the British team. As a writer of children’s books, whenever I’m invited to talk at a school or literary festival I have to warn the organisers that a migraine is a possibility and they should have Plan B ready. I hate these martyred, whingeing warnings.

Others experience vertigo, fever, fainting, dehydration and the flashing lights of the classic migraine aura. A 12th-century nun, Hildegard of Bingen, interpreted the aura as a vision of the Heavenly Kingdom, but if that’s what we can expect of Heaven, you can keep it.

I was a headachy child, dosed up with Disprin dissolved in Lucozade. My dad sighed: “I think Sue has inherited my bad heads.” He often had to lie down for hours with a one-sided, nauseous headache, though it was never diagnosed as migraine because, like many men, he never reported it to his GP.

Our family headaches can be traced back to his granny, Rachel Limb, born around 1840, who had seven children and 30 grandchildren. Many (possibly dozens) of her descendants have migraine. I’d like to organise a reunion but some of us would be too ill to attend. (I was once invited to a reception at the Migraine Association to meet our patron, Princess Margaret, but I couldn’t go because I had a migraine.)

The Limbs were a Derbyshire mining family, famously sulky and taciturn. Traumatic events scarred my dad’s youth, most tragic being the Markham Colliery disaster of 1938, which killed many of his friends. He bottled up his distress for decades, a classic migraine trigger.

Headaches were part of this dark inheritance. I balked at it: being born a girl was enough of a disaster. Once I put on a pair of shorts and told Mum henceforth to call me Norman. I didn’t persevere with it and the arrival of my periods confirmed that femaleness made the headaches worse. Two thirds of migraine sufferers are women, many condemned to four decades of hormone-related attacks.

I had my first true migraine at 21. The fiancé’s mother had just made it clear that she didn’t think I was right for him, and I promptly illustrated my unsuitableness by getting a fierce one-sided headache and spending the next three days vomiting in her pink guest bathroom.

I’d never been sick with a headache before and my GP diagnosed migraine. But he could offer only ergotamine, a drug with a wide range of side-effects. Ergot, a fungal infection of rye, can cause gangrene, vomiting, diarrhoea and hallucinations of being eaten alive by wild animals. I never actually starred as a tiger’s breakfast, but I did, after years of ergotamine use, develop slightly numb and tingly hands and feet and was swiftly taken off the medication.

More recently, triptan drugs have arrived on the scene (I take Imigran) but, while brilliant at aborting migraine, they can cause rebound headaches later, so they’re not the magic bullet. I’m beginning to think that only an actual bullet could provide infallible relief.

Some people get migraines only once a year, but mine vary in frequency. When I was teaching, in my late twenties, I was getting attacks several times a week and almost always on Friday afternoons. The migraine would last all weekend, lifting conveniently on Sunday night, just in time for school the next day.

My search for complementary therapies continues. The traditional medicinal herb feverfew seemed to deter headaches, but only briefly. Acupuncture and osteopathy drew a blank. I take magnesium and vitamin B every day and the homoeopathic remedy Bryonia helps. I wear three pairs of sunglasses simultaneously while driving: prescription, clip-ons and wrapa-rounds, but what I crave is the full Darth Vader.

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