Tuesday, September 13, 2005

They're...everywhere....

I'm beginning to feel a little concerned at the "coincidences" that are making me paranoid about the insect world's intentions towards me (now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write). Following on from last week's unidentified green-crickety-not-a-cricket-spidery-not-a-spider thing on Small Person's ceiling, hostilities have increased. The other morning a wasp fell out from behind the bathroom mirror (I of course immediately checked for very flat nests/portals to other worlds etc) and landed in the soap dish. There are always little tiny scrunched up piders in the corner of the living room ceiling and, owing to the necessity of leaving the light on in the loo all night so that Small Person can go for a wee without fear of being eaten by the Beast from Beauty and the Beast ("but he turns out nice Mummy, so I do like him"), said smallest room looks like the home leg of the Ugly Bug Ball by daybreak. Despite this we've lived in relative harmony with our six-legged friends. But tonight, it got personal. Small Person had finished her bath and had been read Chapter Three of the Magic Faraway Tree, in which Jo, Bess and Fanny (why do I not check these things before committing to the next three months of saying that name every night? Why?) once again failed to actually climb the fucking tree, preferring to instead arse about in the woods with three biscuits each and no need to be home until bedtime. I eventually ran myself a bath, intending to have a bit of a soak before the Other Half arrived from footie stinking, sweaty and in need of some tea. All going well so far, until I returned to the bathroom to find a very large, very dead daddy long-legs floating limply in my lovely hot bubble bath. And it had even left me the tap end. Bastard. Now, this is where I began to feel, well, watched. There's no pretending a daddy long-legs isn't in the room with you - they sort of blunder around making a weird fizzing sound, with no apparent purpose other than to freak people out. Except there absolutely hadn't been one anywhere in the flat (I would have known as Small Person would have done theatrical weeping and trembling, pointing with shaky hand and exclaiming in a querulous B-movie voice that "there's something scary there...") and all the windows were pretty much shut. Setting aside the notion of a very determined daddy long-legs shoving its way through a crack in the bathroom window, tongue poking out of the corner of its mouth with concentration, it all seems a bit odd. So, admitting defeat, I let the bath water out. So now I have the corpse of a gert big insect sprawled inelegantly across the plughole and there's no shifting it. And I just plain can't pick insects up unless it's through fifteen layers of kitchen paper - I'm always vaguely terrified that despite the padding I'll feel that sort of meaty presence and I'll never sleep again.

So, what to do? Write it off as coincidence, or trawl th'internet in search of an insect exorcist (insectorcist?)?

In other news, Small Person was playing in her room this morning listening to her Bowling For Soup cd. She's pretty much learned the words now, and sang with impressive clarity the line "....so I got drunk, had sex with all your friends..."

I'm sure everyone will appreciate how proud I am. Especially her teachers.

22 Comments:

Blogger gun street girl chimed in with...

I'm the same with insects...
I just cant bear to touch them, and seeing spiders move in that way that only spiders do gives me the fear...
I can't kill moths tho, they are too big and they make a sound...

14 September, 2005 00:13  
Blogger patroclus chimed in with...

According to Freud, who clearly knew f**k all about anything at all, women have a natural aversion to spiders because they remind us of female genitalia. To which the only rational response has to be "what the f**k?" To my mind that places Freud in the same category as John Ruskin, who divorced his first wife on the grounds that she was deformed - because she had pubic hair, unlike those lovely Classical statues of goddesses he'd seen in Italy. Those crazy Victorians. So many issues.

I've strayed from the point, haven't I?

14 September, 2005 06:40  
Blogger Dave chimed in with...

Men (so Freud says) on the other hand, love spiders because they remind us...

14 September, 2005 07:57  
Blogger zanna chimed in with...

did you fall in the soap dish or did the wasp? I wish I lived nearer, I could sent my 7 year old protector round. He picks up all manner of insects and dead birds and mice while his mum weeps in the corner.

14 September, 2005 08:15  
Blogger surly girl chimed in with...

moths..uurgh.

spiders for genitalia (jumpers for goalposts)?? poor old mr freud. how complicated life must have been seeing sexual innuendo everywhere - sort of like permanently being at a frankie howerd gig.

i've devalued that, haven't i?

dave - are vicars allowed to think about that sort of thing?

and suze - get that boy in a taxi!!

14 September, 2005 09:51  
Blogger Dave chimed in with...

I don't know of what you are talking.

14 September, 2005 10:06  
Anonymous Anonymous chimed in with...

Blimey, that must have been galling...taking all that time to fill your mammoth bath only to have to let all the water out 'cos a daddy-long-legs was doing the backstroke in it. If you'd waited I would have scooped him out of there and made him spit back all the water he'd swallowed.

14 September, 2005 10:27  
Blogger Stef the engineer chimed in with...

Daddy long legs? Most powerful poison known to man...

This spider thing? In my schooldays I used to have a spider in the garden I fed hover flies to. Grew so big and bloated it could barely move - I called it "Shelob". What would Freud have made of that, I wonder? Mind you, there was a man who lived in a threesome with his wife and her sister. Or was that Marx? I guess one bearded continental type looks much like another.

The urban proletariat harbours a deep, secret longing for its mother?

(It's been a rough couple of days! No 'pider wrestling for me 'though. I mean no killing wildlife, not anything else. Mind you, there's a new pet expression.)

14 September, 2005 14:21  
Blogger surly girl chimed in with...

stef, are you, um, on drugs? if not i think you should be.

14 September, 2005 14:29  
Blogger Stef the engineer chimed in with...

...therefore, all men are cockroaches?

Stef

(Not on drugs, but awaiting a telephone call from his boss announcing "bad news" :-(
Currently in one of those lulls where you're waiting for a personally significant event you know is going to happen to actually happen so you can write/talk/blog about it, and you end up just sort of treading water. There should be a word for it! Oh, there is! It's "ntogru", in Mali, apparently.)

14 September, 2005 15:42  
Blogger surly girl chimed in with...

are you fluent in Mali (malinese?) or did you just plain make that up?

14 September, 2005 16:03  
Blogger Stef the engineer chimed in with...

Tsk. Well, I didn't make it up...

ukkzsnh: Malinese taunt meaning "Hah hah. Surly Girl forgot about the word verification/fount of all wisdom/source of random word!"

(Is it just me, or is it spitting out fewer vowels at the moment?)

14 September, 2005 16:08  
Blogger surly girl chimed in with...

inxjyu: "f*ck you, engineer boy" in polynesian

14 September, 2005 16:17  
Blogger Stef the engineer chimed in with...

;-)

oawiups: sound a f*cked engineer makes.

14 September, 2005 16:51  
Blogger Kyahgirl chimed in with...

I don't like bugs in the bath either SG but the childhood lessons about not wasting water would make me scoop it out I think.
If you had the guts to get 5 tatoos and 18 (was it?) piercings, you have to potential to build the guts to eliminate these pesky creatures. Its just a matter of practise! I'm sure you'll be great at it in no time. Can't make 'the other half' take care of these things all the time. You'll feel so proud! :-)

14 September, 2005 18:17  
Blogger elvira black chimed in with...

Ah, so much to ponder from your post and the comments thereof:

John Ruskin--yes, I heard about that. Didn't he also write Sartor Risartis (sp?) which had something to do with clothes and put me right to sleep after page 2? Wasn't he what you Brits refer to as a poofter? (If this is offensive, I claim/blame cultural illiteracy).

Spiders--the first experience I had with these was via the silver screen in Dr. No, where James Bond had a big black widow crawling on him in bed, heading straight towards his eyes. In a nanosecond, he started up, grabbed his pillow, and squashed it but good--all to the accompaniment of suitably dramatic music. That's shaken and squashed, not stirred.

My b/f is scrupulously clean and scours the bathroom religiously. However, there appears to be an extended family of centipedes or millipedes which come out in the wee hours and frolic around in the tub. Creepy little critters. They kind of shimmer when they move from all the little leggies moving at once.

Waterbugs are about the worst, I think. Though as with many of these larger creatures, I believe they're considered harmless--as long as you don't consider inducing anxiety attacks harmless.

15 September, 2005 05:36  
Blogger Dave chimed in with...

'James Bond had a big black widow crawling on him in bed'

He should be so lucky.

15 September, 2005 07:31  
Blogger Pernicious Panda chimed in with...

You need a cat. Cats will gladly eat such dead things, and even do you the courtesy of killing them if they aren't too spunky. If you can stand the crunching sounds. Otherwise, wait for the thing to dry adequately and vacuum it up, dead or alive. Nothing can live in a vacuum.

15 September, 2005 07:38  
Blogger Dave chimed in with...

Erm... Aliens can. And in space, no one can hear you scream.

15 September, 2005 09:02  
Blogger surly girl chimed in with...

i absolutely can't get close enough to insects to do anything about them due to a firmly-held belief that they will leap up and eat my face at the slightest provocation. i know i wasted the water and i feel bad about that but maybe this will justify...

one of the twenty addresses i lived at was my friend's "cottage" which was under a demolition order. it had no heating, no carpets and no curtains. it did, however, have a rocket-fueled wall mounted water heater in the bathroom. so one cold night i plonked loads of bubble bath in and ran a neck-deep bath. because of the bubbles the water was obscured, so i climbed in and lay there for about 20 minutes. as the bubble started to dissolve i could make out vague shapes in the water....on realising that i was sharing my bath with various (and numerous) bits of dead spider, dead centipede and dead woodlouse that had been accumulating in the water heater since time immemorial i leaped out of the bath so fast i was just a blur...

hence my fear.

15 September, 2005 09:21  
Blogger Fizzy good chimed in with...

Dead arthropods are probably my second biggest fear, having got over the needles thing. Now only Linda Barker keeps them off the top spot.

I always hated it when the Beast turned into the Prince. I was a bit in love with him when he was ugly and damaged. (This tells you all you need to know about my attitude to men).

My cat - before he ran away (the diet was a big mistake) - used to eat live spiders. They made him sneeze.

17 September, 2005 13:49  
Blogger Kyahgirl chimed in with...

ewww. Its a wonder you ever ventured into a bath tub again!!

17 September, 2005 15:32  

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