SOME years ago during a holiday in Greece, I suffered a very unpleasant bout of sunstroke.

I still vividly recall the resultant hallucinations as Magnus Magnusson and myself both dressed in basques and fishnet stockings took on a team of nubile women captained by Sophia Loren at lacrosse.

When I woke up in the middle of this bizarre dream and couldn't move my legs, I was convinced that full body paralysis had set in and that I would be taken home in a crate.

Looking back, I was glad of two things.

Firstly, that I was in no way sexually attracted to the former host of Mastermind.

But secondly, that I did not have a big medical book at hand to confirm my wild diagnosis.

Long before the internet and online self-diagnosis became every hypochondriac's chosen tool, every home worth its salt had the Big Family Medical Encyclopaedia somewhere in the house.

In most, it's propping open a door or underpinning a cheese plant, but in too many, it's a passport to feeling so much worse about yourself.

Over the years, the moment any of our two children breathed in a little too deeply, my wife would dive headfirst into the book to find some rare tropical disease with comparable symptoms.

The fact that Beri-Beri or Green Monkey Disease can only be caught by pygmy natives of a small area of the Amazon Basin doesn't undermine her zeal.

Indeed, her loving efforts to bring comfort to her offspring often fell only slightly short of scanning Yellow Pages for a tribal witchdoctor.

This accursed book is the bane of my life but even I have to admit that I flicked through the pages when I was feeling a tad rough.

The trouble is, of course, that being a man, my condition couldn't possibly be anything trivial.

So by the time I had closed this massive tome, I was either suffering from complete mental and physical exhaustion, the bends or I was eight months pregnant.

The simple fact is that if you want to feel worse about the way you feel, buy yourself a medical dictionary.

Some years ago, my wife's unhealthy preoccupation with health starting spreading to our youngest, who I discovered poring over a double page spread on childbirth.

As she was just eight at the time, the ensuing conversation was long, involved and featured the phrase Ask your mum' on several occasions.

I now have this recurring nightmare where a woman goes into labour in the middle of a shopping centre and my daughter pushes her way through the crowd, shouting: "Let me through, I'm a teenager with a big medical encyclopaedia..."