Now, when writing for you folk what Royston Vasey's shopkeepers might like to call "a local column for local people", I'm aware there are probably things I shouldn't say.

I should be the poster girl for our glorious town, emitting sunshine with every subordinate clause and spending regular afternoons feasting on coconut ice at the end of the pier.

Dave Benson Phillips and I should skip hand-in-hand down Chapel Road, quoting Oscar Wilde and spreading to all the sheer joy of living in the crown green bowls capital of the UK.

So, this in mind, I know what I'm about to say is slightly risky business.

Yes, announcing that I'm "allergic to Worthing" might rank as one of the more controversial statements that passes through this space, but I'll risk public flogging onstage at the Pavilion to get this off my chest.

Worthing makes me ill. I am Worthing-intolerant. There, I said it! And I apologise wholeheartedly to the mayor.

Before you all start throwing sticks of rainbow rock at my head, let me explain that it's physiological symptoms I'm grumbling about – and you have to concede that the physiological is largely beyond the realms of my control (this excludes my ongoing research into the varying effects of dipping one's fingers into hot melted wax and making those satisfying little finger hats to peel off when the pain subsides.

No pub table candle remains unfondled in my tireless search for answers).

I wish it wasn't so.

Theoretically, the idea of coming home for Christmas is nothing short of lovely; Stuart Suitcase and I strolling down Bulkington Avenue while people lean from doorways and windows to wave and proffer freshly-baked mince pies.

Small children sing, dogs bark and seagulls do a bit of formation flying overhead in my honour.

I could be Gary Lineker in that Walkers ad from the '90s, or maybe Fireman Sam in a frock.

I could be, if I didn't start coming out in a rash as the train goes through Lancing.

My body thinks itself a bit of an anarchist.

Cut me open and my white blood cells are wearing bondage trousers and pogoing to Stiff Little Fingers.

They think it's rightful revenge, because I never give my legs proper insulation and count glacé cherries as one of my five-a-day.

I spend all term the very picture of rosy-cheeked health, then come back to Worthing and before I've had time to reclaim the remote from Disney Channel wilderness, I'm struck down with a mystery illness.

The kind of mystery illness everyone thinks they've had but nobody can give you a cure for.

The kind my Granny can always tell me has killed three people from the Women's Institute.

"I feel a bit like my stomach's rotting away, and all I want to eat is the mashed potato from the top of a microwaveable fish pie," I told the doctor last Christmas.

"Hmm," he said.

"My head feels like the white noise on a TV. Channel 4 white noise, not ITV," I reported at Easter.

"Hmmmm," he said.

"My eyelids feel all swollen and I think my brain's puffing up.

Sometimes it feels like there's a six-year-old in a jumper sitting on my lungs," I announced in the summer.

He said: "Hmmm. Have you tried Lemsip?"

Not just the tri-yearly bout of bleurgh, Worthing also makes me uglier. Honest.

My hair ceases to be hair and becomes the mane of the childhood My Little Pony your brother stole for "experiments".

I get spots, which I then squeeze a week before I should, which then bleed, scab, and become the kind of facial fixtures people feel the need to ask you about in Tesco.

I feel and look generally icky the whole time I'm home, but get me back on a train to Victoria and all the stomach-rotting and brain-puffing and chest-sitting melts away faster than you can say "congestion charge".

Thus I am forced to conclude one of the following: either, after 10 years of normal, non-mysterious illnesses, I have suddenly become allergic to Worthing, or my body is so busy dealing with pollution and Boris Johnson during term-time that it's forgotten how to process clean air.

Thinking about it, I suppose this same pollution obscures my true frizzy, carbuncular reflection in the mirror most of the year and makes me think I look passably decent.

So actually… my seaside self is my real self. Drat. Pass the coconut ice.