Size queen

I’ve been killing a lot of insects recently. Actually, that’s a lie: I’ve been trying to kill a lot of insects recently, with that pathetic routine where you follow it intently, then clap your hands like you’re happy and you know it. And the insect is happy too, since it can spot a rubbish human being a mile off and knows exactly when to dart out of the way of my flailing limbs.

Reason is, of course, there are a lot of little bug(ger)s in town, courtesy of the “monsoon”. (I use quotation marks since we’ve had about three proper storms, sporadic drizzle and lots of cloudy, dry days. I’d describe it as a damp squib, except it’s not been very damp. A lovely word, squib, almost never used without the word damp in front of it, unless you work in the pyrotechnics industry or some other explosive-related field such as, er, terrorism. Perhaps worth pointing out, for the record, that I don’t work in terrorism. I could have done, but I never had the Latin.)

Aaaaanyway, the point is that the monsoon brings insects, which bring diseases – not just malaria, but also that nasty dengue fever and the unpleasant-sounding leptospirosis. Everyone quite reasonably gets their knickers in a twist about all of these, the annual increase in hospital admissions proving the case for such thong contortions a posteriori. So I expend considerable effort flapping my arms around like I’m doing a comedy misogynistic imitation of girls trying to catch.

And this is where, dear reader (Hello Mum), I hear you cry ‘Hypocrite!’. Yes, just a couple of months ago on this very site I explained how in the land of Gandhiji, I didn’t want to kill my crickets. Mea culpa: but crickets don’t actually harm you, whereas the flies and mozzies are potential harbingers of doom.

But more importantly, the crickets are bigger. Which means I can sort of see their different bits and they look like real creatures with eyes and big wings and funny legs that they rub together really fast or whatever it is they do. The little flies and mozzies, meanwhile, are just specks, barely a pixel on my sightline: ipso facto, like the people on the ground from the top of the big ferris wheel in The Third Man, they’re so small that in my warped Limey philosophy I conclude that no-one will miss them when they’re gone. I guess I’m just a shameless size queen.