ants

and a Great Lesson

I wanted to write about how I saw a comedian I know who makes great fun stuff do a genuine Raybans Meta glasses #ad (the ones where yes, you can listen to music etc but also you can film things without anyone knowing you’re filming). I watched this on Instagram convinced it was a parody, realised it wasn’t, and my disappointment felt so lame. Like an old guy in the 1940s kicking off about television, except televisions weren’t also used to perv on people in changing rooms.

Anyway anyway, I started ranting about this but it wasn’t funny/I depressed myself, so instead I’m keeping things light by writing something about poison.

I often give context as to where I’m writing stuff in the audio version of these posts, so here’s some in the written version for a little treat: I am sitting in my parents’ living room while my mum gets ready for something, but she’s listening to an audiobook. So every few minutes I hear a door opening, some of the book, and then the door closing again. The twist is: I’m reading the audiobook, so it’s very unnerving. Past Me is upstairs! Present Me is downstairs! Where will Future Me be? Maybe filmed by someone without my consent while I’m asleep on a train with my mouth open.

Alright here is what happened.

Last summer, ants started marching in through the front door, so I put down lemon shavings, tea tree oil and my partner had fun with the pepper grinder. This sounds like he stuck it up his arse; he ground pepper on the ants’ trail, because if you neutralise the scent, they won’t settle their colony inside the wall of your front door. It worked!

We christened them The Lads, and we lived in harmony. They largely kept away, but if any popped by for a scout, my partner would get the pepper grinder out (of his arse) (I’m sorry Adam if you are reading this, which I know you are, because you are very supportive of my output) (just like I’m supportive of you shelving the pepper grinder) and they’d vanish again.

See also: the woodlice, with whom we also live in harmony. Christened The Boys, they have totally taken over the yard and occasionally wander in through the back door with an insouciance only achievable if you’re the sort of person whose skeleton is on the outside of your body. Oh hey, how’s it going, I don’t have any skin.

Now, I do kill things on purpose sometimes. I got so scared when a moth flew up my trousers last year that I killed it by what can only be described as Focused And Repeated Sitting. I’ve killed mosquitos and flies. My main aim is to try to avoid killing things where I can, and give it a bit more thought than I did back in 2018 when I covered my flat in flypaper and realised afterwards how I could have just wafted them out of the window. Alright so flies aren’t exactly dogs, but it’s still needlessly cruel!!

Anyway, last week there were a thousand flying ants scaling the walls of the kitchen. I know I sometimes exaggerate, for example I once wrote on here about seeing a wasp in Malta that was the size of a horse. Academically I know it wasn’t the size of a horse, or even a foal, but it felt like that to me.

Exaggerating allows you, the reader, to experience what I, the buffoon, am experiencing in my own head which is often wildly extreme. I have no perspective. Quite literally: if I walk away from you, I will look exactly the same size. Little joke there about perspective I don’t know I’m just trying to have a laugh for christ’s sake.

Wow I really forgot my point there and had to re-read the paragraph to remember what this entire post was about.

Okay, honestly, there were a thousand flying ants in the kitchen. It was dramatic enough that my partner, who found them first, said ‘Whoa okay we’ve got a real infestation’ and he never exaggerates.

This came on the hottest day of that El Nino heatwave, where there’d already been three days of disgusting heat, a trip to visit my friend in Paris had been cancelled, and I was struggling to function let alone make good decisions, so after we’d vacuumed the ants up (and emptied them out into the yard, away from the kitchen) and I’d arranged about five lemons around the skirting board from whence they came, I called a pest control company.

It wasn’t even impulsive, because I called about twelve. Turns out a lot of pest control companies are just one man called John who enjoys killing things. When I asked one John if he dealt with ants nests he said ‘I mean, yeah I could?’ Like yeah we all could? I could buy a gun and shoot them?

I booked a man for the following day, because he explained flying ants are the same as normal ants (just at different stages of maturity) so I felt he had a bit more going on. In the meantime, I noticed that all the ants had stopped coming in. They didn’t like the lemon; it had worked the same as it did last summer. This simple choice they’d made as a collective (‘ugh there’s lemon there, back it up Lads’) sort of jolted me back into my body. I could stop this now. I could just ring up the man and cancel!

But what would I say on the phone? Oh hello, no need to come round tomorrow because the ants have emotionally moved me! Hiya, funny thing, turns out there’s no need to come because I’ve hallucinated the ants! When I’d expressed reservations before, he’d said they were going to cause structural damage and that it was for the best. If I cancelled now, he’d think I was some lame bleeding heart vegan who drinks almond matcha lattes and cries if she steps on a snail, and he’d be right.

In retrospect, why is this seen as a weakness? I’ll deal with that later, but at that moment my god I felt silly, so pushed it out of my mind until 8am when the man turned up and started spraying the front of the house.

‘You’ve got three nests,’ he said while I stood in my pyjamas. I went back inside and, after a couple of minutes building myself up, went back outside and said as casually as I could ‘oh hey, you don’t have to kill all of them - like just maybe the one you’ve already done?’ but it was too late. They’d died.

I could have deterred them with lemon oil, or at least tried a bit harder before deploying Death Spray Man (he was really nice, and his last name was Joy which feels ironic.)

This must be what it feels like to be a warlord. To convince yourself it doesn’t matter, that you had no choice, that they can’t really feel anything anyway. Of course they can! No, they’re not able to articulate it in the same way as a human can, but pain is pain and about a million Lads died underneath my front steps.

Also, Mr. Joy The Death Spray Man said the ants would have caused structural damage, but realistically by the time that becomes a problem I’ll be too busy fighting in the climate wars anyway so this didn’t need to happen.

After this experience I have decided to avoid pest control going forward, if at all possible. I will put bits of lemon peel and tea tree oil around the perimeter of the house every few months to discourage any Lads from making their home here, and instead point them in the direction of the overgrown yard that I don’t want to de-weed in case there are lots of Lads and Boys having a nice time amid the undergrowth. Maybe I’ll make a sign. I obviously won’t make a sign, calm down.

Some of you might think I’m being over the top, but without wanting to be antagonistic, how’s that way of thinking working out for us all? The cognitive dissonance of humanity is at an all time ‘everyone’s bombing everything and I’ll use Claude or whatever because who cares’ right now; I reckon it’s good to refocus and look at our own little lives. See how we can be a bit better in a small way, because the big stuff is out of our control.

Some of you might think I’m a terrible vegan/person/vegan person for killing the ants in the first place but to you I say: it’s not about being perfect, it’s about improvement. And yeah I’m sorry I agree I hate myself. I did not try my best for The Lads.

They made their feelings known, though. The universe rebalanced. Later that day I went for brunch, there were no vegan options other than leek and potato soup which I didn’t want. I ate it anyway, didn’t enjoy it and promptly got food poisoning. The poisoner became the poisonee. Or poisoned.

Won’t go into detail but I thought I’d had food poisoning before; turns out I have not had food poisoning before. I’ve had a really bad stomach maybe? I’ve certainly never spent four hours on the loo with a plastic bowl on my lap. At one point both of the bodily processes occurred at the exact same time with such velocity I nearly fell off the toilet.

As this particular bout happened I thought: yeah. Karma. And then: maybe I should strap myself to the toilet because if I fall off it during a similar bout I’ll have to redo the bathroom. Many apologies for going into detail.

This was a good reminder, while I moaned ‘help’ quietly to myself, that just because I wear clothes and bemoan my peer’s decisions to promote pervert glasses, I remain an animal. I am not better than an ant, just because I am typing this on my little laptop made from parts that are destroying the global south. I am much, much worse.

Ants just do their thing and contribute to a balanced ecosystem. Their laptops are all sustainably sourced and there are no reports of ants shilling for AI. I suppose the real question is, if given the chance, would an ant secretly film a woman in a changing room, and honestly I think they’re more interested in carrying bits of cartoon people’s picnics away.

I will leave you today by swearing to protect the woodlouse Boys in a way I failed to protect the ant Lads. I am going to non-AI google (udm14.com is great once you can remember the name and stop confusing it with UB40 or wmds etc) natural woodlouse deterrents and sprinkle them on the doorstep. Even if a thousand of them appear in the kitchen, I will do my utmost not to call Big John or shoot them with guns and not just because the only thing I’ve been able to eat since Sunday is bowls of white rice.

Big love, peace and love, love and love x