You know how sometimes you get a subtle tingly feeling on the skin of your arm or your leg that feels like an insect? And when you look over to brush it off you can’t see an insect at all? Then if you’re an ordinary person who’s not unnaturally afraid of creepy crawlies, when it’s happened often enough and you become old enough to realise it’s just one of your nerve endings gone funny, or a brush of zephyr wind. Then you learn to ignore that subtle tingling on your skin that feels like an insect, but really isn’t.

Unless you’re in my house.

If you’re in my house and you feel a tingle of invisible insect on your skin, that ain’t no nerve ending sugar, there’s an ant crawling up your leg!

Ever since we moved into this house (a few years ago) there have been slight creepy crawly problems that the real estate agent just happened to forget to mention. My first winter here was spent picking little dead worms nestled snugly in the corners of the otherwise pristine white carpet. Moving back the couch after a mere three months revealed a motley collection of upended flies, moths and other interesting Unidentified Flying Insects. Which were dead. And don’t even mention our summers!

Every summer, the shonky wood they used to build our doors and walls expand and, not only making my bedroom door impossible to close, give a free pass into the house to our friendly neighbourhood family of ants. Don’t ask me how, I bet you’re thinking that if the wood expands then it effectively makes any ant-fitting hole even smaller, but this is a ‘phenomenon’ that only happens in the summer months. If you spill a miniscule drop of pancake batter near the stove and forget to clean it up, wait two minutes and you’ll find a swarming pack of ants going for their lives to grab all of it they can. Just in the last two months we have gone through two cans of insect spray! It’s like MAGIC! If you sit at our computer desk for fifteen minutes, I’ll bet you anything you want that you’ll have found at least six ants crawling along the keyboard/hard-drive/table/your arm/your leg. And no matter how many times you squish the bloody buggers, I can guarantee that there’s another five lying in waiting to make the mad dash from the door to the fridge. And then for revenge they’ll send one of their big red bull ants to bite you in the elbow. I never said they didn’t have a sense of humour.

Let’s talk about the Ant Trail of ’02. It was a sweltering summer day when I came home from school looking for refreshment and cover from the unrelenting heat of the walk from the train station back home. I collapse on a bar stool in the kitchen and do you know what I see? A pulsating, black, slightly wobbly line of ants making steady progress from the corner of the ceiling all the way into the pantry. Not a pretty sight. So naturally I screamed and grabbed the Mortein and went totally crazy with the spraying. And practically blinded myself in the process as the little droplets never reached the ceiling and most likely floated back onto my own face. Of course then we had to clean out the whole pantry, finding many a mouldy abandoned foodstuff in the process. The ‘lemon fragrance’ of the insect spray gradually insinuated itself into the walls and our clothing, and our kitchen had the slightest hint of ‘lemon’ for the rest of the month.

Must go, as I can hear the pitter-patter of six little legs making their way across my bathroom counter. More ants to squash, more trails to discover and another summer of little black bugs awaits.

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