ONE of the delights of growing older for many of us is being able to relinquish membership of the Migraine Club.

It happens gradually, as the searing headaches afflicting us since our teens grow more infrequent and less debilitating.

We were told this would happen when the attacks first began all those years ago and when, unlike the invincible GPs of today, doctors looked as though they themselves had suffered from the conditions they were diagnosing.

Migraine is kin to 'flu in that some people who claim to have contracted it are really undergoing a far less painful visitation, by the flunkey of some malevolent lordship who may or may not show.

I was 16 and in 'Digger' Brown's fifth-form physics class at West Mon School, Pontypool, when the Big M first introduced himself. (To visualise him as male seems not to be sexist, as it is always men who regularly take up cudgels with ferocity.)

Newton's second law of thermodynamics looked even more incomprehensible on the blackboard as my vision splintered and a shoal of tadpoles swam before me, all flickering to disturb my sight.

I must have looked seriously pale (or 'peeky', as my mother would have said) for the school to have let me off early, and the train journey from Blaendare Road to Pontnewydd was the most troubled I have ever taken. I was seeing triple, not double. As far as I can recall, secondary schools in the late 1950s didn't employ matrons who could alleviate a pupil's distress; that role was fulfilled by the nearest thing to someone concerned with fitness, namely a beefy PT master with a bottle of iodine in his cupboard. Not much use.

Having restored my sight, Big M made me vomit uncontrollably then bound my head with a steel grip and tightened it for five hours while I tried to hide from him in a darkened room.

Relenting towards nightfall, he departed, leaving me to fall into a deep and undisturbed sleep for about 10 hours.

The next day, absent from school, I reached for Enquire Within, the family's expanded first aid manual that frightened or consoled depending on how your symptoms matched its list of complaints.

A hypochondriac's bible, no less.

About migraine it was clear, down to the description of the heavenly well-being you felt on waking after an attack and seeing objects glow with an intenser light. And there was a negative achievement in having succumbed to the poor relation of epilepsy, a visitor of such destructive power that you had to bolt the door against it with medication.

Attacks continued into my twenties, when I was asked to test a new anti-migraine drug, a purple pill the size of a pinhead that disarmed Big M, making him cack-handed and less of a tormentor.

But it had no defence against his bouts of invigorated sadism. The bully dogged my steps for 30 years, always calling unannounced and outstaying his welcome.

Then he vanished for about five years. I pondered the plight of his new victims, for undoubtedly he was wreaking injury and discomfort elsewhere.

In my mid-50s he re-appeared for some reason, though like a tired warrior with no sense of fatigue, forgiveness or contrition.

He'd lost his power to seriously maim, if not to frighten.

These days he sends a few tadpole outriders for 10 minutes, but I can barely see them and they are the prelude to only minor irritation, easily relieved by paracetamol.

My membership of the Migraine Club, that long-established confederacy of pain, has lapsed rather than ended, so scarred am I by 40 years of putting up with him. He could well come knocking again with younger mates.

During that time, I have read more about the relationship of migraine to epilepsy, as well as theories of what triggers attacks - chocolate, celery, cheese, stress, planets in unfavourable conjunction, or a combination of these - and how they are often related to creativity.

Sufferers are only interested in the creativity of medical science in attempting to repel them, to limit their activity.

After all, it was right about the bigger picture: one day, the victory over Big M will be theirs.