I have nothing against insects and creepy crawlies.

Except of course when they bug me.

For some reason, I was plagued with flies for the first few days in France.  It was nothing to do with personal hygiene because I had had a shower the previous month.

I armed myself with a can of weapons-grade flyspray and sat here creating havoc in the fly population.

I didn’t give a shit if their mammys and daddys love them.

I didn’t give a shit if they had a family of five hundred little darlings waiting for them to come home from a day’s work.

If they came near me, they got a blast of biological and chemical warfare.

They made my job easy, because they are so fucking stupid.

When you swat a wasp, it buggers off somewhere else.  When you kick a dog, it sulks off and won’t talk to you again.  When you swat at a fly, it immediately returns to the scene of the crime.  This is what I hate the most about them.  If one tickles your arm, you swat at it and it immediately returns to the same spot.

In the theatre of war, however, this is an advantage.  I spray ’em, and they piss off.  But they come straight back to where the cloud of gas still lingers.

Their only weapon of defence was reproduction.  The little fuckers [and I use the adjective deliberately]  were treating my knees as some kind of bordello and insisted on copulating there.  This was one of my main areas of attack.  My spray can was an artificial form of coitus interruptus.

They sent an small group of twenty.  They were waving white flags and pleading for amnesty.

I sprayed the bastards.

Fuck the Geneva Convention.

Then of course there were the spiders.

I have nothing against spiders, but unfortunately Herself has.  The house was inundated with those spindly ones – the ones that look like a small pea standing on eight bent hairs.

I could have gone around killing them, but that would have been cruel.  Or I could have put them outside one by one, but they appeared faster than I could put them out.  So – and I am using the Nuremberg Defence here – I sucked them up with a vacuum cleaner.  I told myself that they had a fighting chance as it was one of those new-fangled Dyson lookalikes.

As I went around sucking them off the walls and ceilings, I wondered what kind of conversation was going on in the dust bag? …………

‘JEEEZUS!!  FUCK!!!  WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED THERE!!!!’

‘Howya Bill.  I dunno what happened, but it just happened to me too.’

‘Oh! Hi, Fred.  I was having a quiet morning doze on the ceiling when this huge noisy wind thing came at me, and the next thing I know – I’m in here.’

‘Most of the gang are in here.  Poor old Jason over there hasn’t a leg to stand on.  They all got sucked off in the wind.  LOOK OUT!  Here comes the Murphy family.  Hi John!  Hi Mavis!’

‘What is this place?  It’s kinda dusty in here?’

‘I noticed that.  It’s kind of crowded too.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘I don’t know.  I’m going back to sleep.’

Two or three days later, I decided to empty the vacuum cleaner.  I took the dust container off and had a look inside.

Do you remember the film ‘Alien’?

Do you remember John Hurt lying there with his chest heaving with live things inside?

It was like that.

The container had a good fill of dust, and it was pulsating.  It was quite hypnotic to watch.  To be on the safe side, I brought it down the garden and stuck my hand into the dust.

Underneath the top layer, all my little victims were having a party.  Dozens of them.

I let them go and they all scurried away.

At least they will have a good story for the grandchildren.