Take the hair of a virgin kid [a young goat],

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Let a wise woman spin [it] on the right side ...

And bind the head of the sick man ...

That the Headache may ascend to heaven

Like the smoke of a peaceful homestead.

- Ancient Babylonian verse-remedy for migraine headaches

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This column is being scribbled during Migraine Awareness Week. Made aware, the authoritative Canberra Times and ABC radio news are reporting that millions of Australians (one in seven of us is a 'migraineur') are gnawed by the beast of migraine in one or more of its many, many, mysterious manifestations.

For almost all of my life I have been blessed with robust good health so that disabling ill health, whenever it comes (as migraines have now begun coming to me in my old age), always has a kind of intriguing novelty about it. (And please forgive me for my overuse of the word 'migraineur' but it is excitingly new to wordmongering me and I can't leave it alone.)

And this was the spirit in which Virginia Woolf (a migraineur, like your columnist, and like Elvis Presley, Napoleon Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud, Vincent van Gogh, Hugh Jackman and a zillion others) wrote her healthily witty and wise essay On Being Ill.

It is a brilliant piece. I commend it to everyone who is ever languishingly unwell, including the perhaps one in seven of this column's teeming millions of readers who are tormented by migraines.

"Considering how common illness is," Woolf reflects. "how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view.

"When we think of this, as illness frequently forces us to........

© Canberra Times