Forget any of the erudite arguments put forward against the existence of God by Dawkins or Hitchens. You want to disprove God? Just take one long look at the ocean floor, and behold some of the horrendous and upsetting abominations down there: things with see-through condom heads and eight-hundred legs that drag themselves over the pitch-black seabed like luminous tumours; swarms of sentient, electrified cucumbers with neon afros; things that look like eyes perched on dismembered heels.
Allow me to crystalise my thoughts through the medium of song: and a one, and a two… and a one, two, three, four… “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small…”
Really? Really God? You made them all? All of them? Those things? Why, God? Why? Were you drunk, God? Did you have a mental breakdown? Because if these creatures are so crucial to your Jesus-centric, global master-plan, then why did you hide them underneath 20,000 feet of wet, crushing blackness?
Anyway, I’m not too concerned about the nightmares that dwell within the ocean. I’m not an anemone. I don’t live in the ocean. When I visit the general vicinity of the sea area, I trust that people are going to skim or fly me over it as quickly as possible, and take great care not to dunk or somehow explode me into it. What I’m more concerned about is the land, and specifically my little portion of it. I’m talking insects and beasties, people. Hellish, hideous beasties.
Summer is upon us, which means that even as I write this hordes of insects are amassing at the peripheries of our suburban castles, just waiting for the right moment to breach the defences and invade. Spiders, flies, wasps, ants, beetles: the whole bug-ugly battalion of multi-legged motherfuckers; hideous creatures that look like they were brought into existence by the collective imaginations of Clive Barker and HR Geiger after a night of particularly heavy drinking.
Beasties disgust and agitate me in ways that no other creature on earth can manage, with the possible exception of Katy Hopkins. I hate them. I hate them because they’re travesties, abominations, and harbingers of filth and disease. I hate them because they make a mockery of my mission to protect my home and my family from foreign invaders. I hate them because my primal programming compels me to avoid or destroy them. I hate them because they remind me of my own pointless and arbitrary existence on this planet. I’m a mere sack of meat, a host, a vessel, vulnerable, venal and killable: I and my kind are trapped in the ageless, endless cycle of shagging, spawning, shitting, eating and dying, a game every one of us on this planet plays, no matter how many legs we do or don’t have.
And all of this ephemeral, swirling mess of existential misery comes into sharp focus whenever I see a spider stringing and spitting its arse-glue around the lamp-shades in my living room. I think I think too much. I think I need to get out more (but in a fully-sealed bio-suit, of course).
I wish I was a spider sometimes, if only so I wouldn’t have to worry about spiders all the time.
(Note to God: if you do happen to exist, and the Buddhists happened to be right about reincarnation, then please don’t be an asshole and read the previous sentence as a direct and literal appeal for you to reincarnate me as a spider, so I could be squished by my own great-great-grandson or something. FYI, I want to come back as myself again, only thinner and richer)
Summer’s influx of beasties transforms me into Howard Hughes. I’ll gladly sit in the house suffocating myself half-to-death in the baking, dog-killing heat – the windows and doors clamped shut, gaffer tape stretched over every gap and crack – if my sacrifice can prevent the entry of even one housefly.
YOU… SHALL NOT PASS!
As a child, I couldn’t eat my breakfast in the kitchen, or enjoy a simple shit in the bathroom, until every fly in the room had been snuffed out. I’d waddle around the bathroom snapping at flies with a hand-towel, always on the cusp of crapping myself, but unable to sit, squat or shit until every last one was vanquished, turtle’s-head or no turtle’s-head. The thought of those verminous swines lowering themselves onto my exposed buttocks mid-shit like some team of anal astronauts (Buzz Aldrin indeed) was too much for my sanity to bear.
My fly fury wasn’t confined to the bathroom and kitchen. I had venetian blinds in my bedroom, which came in handy for my part-time career as a fly serial-killer. Each slat was perpetually splattered with the blood and pus of a multitude of dead flies. I’d stun them, perch their break-dancing bodies on a slat, and then pull the cord to concertina them to death. My mum had to keep taking the blinds outside to scrub them down, doubtless wondering if her son was warming up to start taking down prostitutes.
In our household this year, summer began with a war against ant-kind. Now, ants are great if they happen to be animated and voiced by Woody Allen. They’re not so great if they’re festooning your tiles and doing the conga across your counter-tops.
Their invasion was slow, insidious. Cunning! I’d find a new battalion of them peppered over the tiles next to the kitchen window each and every morning. I’d snuff them out, squishing their little bodies like bubble-wrap beneath my fingers. They’d return, they’d die, they’d return, they’d die. Then, nothing. No ants. Not a single one. Days would pass. A week, maybe. I’d cautiously declare the republic of our kitchen to be an ant-free zone, and rejoice in my victory over those mangy, mandibled monstrosities.
Alas, the first ants proved to be nothing more than the scouts for a full-out invasion force. The ants returned, they always returned, but each time in greater number, swelling their ranks until my fingers were black with the blood of a hundred of their tiny soldiers. They made my bin-cupboard into a fortress. One day I opened the metal sugar tin – sealed so tightly that nary a microbe could squeeze between lid and box – to find them swimming through the sweet white sugar like kids larking in a summer lake. Naturally, I killed them all. Over endless weeks I watched them slip and scurry beneath and between tiles and cupboards like something out of the X-Files. I watched as they sent forth their scouts and raised an anty flag above our fridge. I raged, I ranted, I splatted and thumped. Killed, cleaned, shifted and scrubbed. I genuinely debated slicing off their tiny heads and spearing them on Blu-Tac-mounted toothpicks as a warning to the survivors. Nothing worked. Nothing could stop them. With a small, reasonably mobile child in the house, I was reluctant to opt for the nuclear option: chemical sprays and bait traps.
I discussed the problem with a lady at work. She appeared to have the answer. “I will tell you something that is guaranteed to work,” she said with confidence.
“Yes?” I said, leaning in.
“Something that will send those ants packing, never to return.”
“Yes??!”
“It’s simple, costless and effective, and it has always worked for me.”
“Yes????!!!!”
“You must ask them to leave.”
I asked myself to leave my workmate’s vicinity. I obeyed myself. I then went to B&Q and bought chemical bait traps. Fuck Dr Doolittling the situation. Genocide wins, baby.
Flies and ants may be bad, but wasps are the worst. They’re psychotic. I had one in my living room once that buzzed and dive-bombed at me with the ferocity of an airborne tiger. I attempted to swat it with a phone book, which I assumed would at least subdue the unruly fucker. It didn’t. The wasp came at me madder, faster and harder than before. I retreated from the room and slammed the door behind me. I may even have whimpered. One thing was clear: I needed to regroup and formulate a strategy. But first I had to ask myself: how the hell do I regroup when there’s only one of me?
You’ve got to at least admire the wasp. Each one is like a little Viking ever-ready to join Valhalla. Imagine you were shrunk down to the size of a wasp. Could you imagine yourself hovering a hundred feet in the air with a jet-pack strapped to your back as a giant tried to swipe you with a block of flats? What would you do? I think it most likely you’d whoosh off into the sky trying to stave off a heart-attack as every ounce of shit in your body exploded down your legs. What you probably wouldn’t do is whip a fork out from your pocket and zoom towards the giant shouting, ‘LET’S HAVE IT, YOU BIG FUCKING NONCE!’
Credit where credit’s due. Wasps: you’re an admirable breed of mental.
Thankfully, insects have been less visible and less of a problem over the last few years – wasps especially – owing to our cold summers and even colder winters. This is why, despite how much I may whinge about the scattershot nature of the Scottish weather, I wouldn’t change its dire character for the world. Australia, South Africa, FL USA, everywhere else in the world where it’s hot and humid: enjoy your beautiful sunshine.
But also enjoy your endless hordes of slimy, creepy, crawly, stingy, bitey little bugs and beasts. I’ll be here watching the rain drum against my windows, snapping the occasional fly and snubbing the odd ant, happy that at least my unwelcome visitors don’t have fangs or venom.
Yet.
UPDATE: This article you’re now reading – and that I’ve just combed through editing and tidying up – is now 3-years-old, written during the reasonably crap (and therefore reasonably typical) summer of 2015. Summer 2018 has been one of the warmest in recent memory, which means there will probably be grounds to write a whole new beastie-related article next year – a very terrifying one. Here’s hoping for a minus-20 winter!
