Makes Mah Guts Churn

So, I've moved in with my beautiful girlfriend who has less than beautiful interests.  I've been subjected to all manner of vapid reality television shows and the cacophonous bickering of Jeremy Kyle.  Matter of fact, the modern gladiatorial pantomime is the backdrop the key-tapping which is creating this blog.  How enjoyable.

The interest that I find most difficult to deal with is her obsession with horror films.  I've witnessed murders, possessions, stalking, house invasions, mutilation, monsters and more screaming than my days should contain.  When you are inundated with horror it can have a rather profound effect on your mindset.

We had just finished watching a double-header of Ginger Snaps and Playback, the former about a teenage girl turning into a werewolf, the latter about people being possessed through old videos.  We were sat in the living room, facing the tv, with the entirety of the house behind us.  There's nothing that'll induce paranoid twitching glances behind your back than empty space, pregnant with creepy possibilities.  It was time for bed.

I made my way to the bathroom for some pre-sleep ablutions when my journey was halted by a scene most horrendous.  Opposite the bathroom is the door which opens up onto the back garden.  The back door, if you will.  Within the frame of this door is a flap, which small household animals are able to use at their convenience.  At this point, the flap was locked closed.

Dripping through the loose connections were maggots.  Scores of them.  These particles of evil, bloated rice were oozing inside like the gunge of the blob that ate everything.  A click glance to the clock; 2am.  Weary eyelids sinking, we were forced to gee ourselves up, to buoy those exhausted lids and get stuck in to the grim job at hand.  After we finished crying, we fenced the be-maggoted area with towels, boiled the kettle and carpet bombed the area with bleach and boiling water.  This slowed the heinous devils a little, but they continued to writhe in spite of the onslaught.  A minute of research on the internet suggested there was chemicals in house polish and dog shampoo which might put an end to the creatures.  With a gloop and a hiss, Mr Sheen and the pink gloop of dog shampoo joined this concoction; George's Malevolent Medicine.

Under the weight of this all-or-nothing alchemical experiment, still the infernal monsters came.  More and more they broke through the ill-made flap.  It was time to resort to more desperate measures.  Shedding my pajamas, I equipped myself with an old pair of jeans, heavy boots, rainproof coat, gloves and a trusty <spunge> beanie hat.  I was now ready for the mission.  As ready as I was ever going to be.

I left the house by the front door, and in the premature morning darkness I was buffeted by wind and rain.  I circled around the street to the back alley, the longest walk of my life.  I opened the back gate from the outside with worrying ease, and surveyed what little of the back garden I could see in the darkness.  The glow from the kitchen and bathroom windows barely pushed the darkness from the perimeter of the building as I, cloaked in the darkness, crept closer to the house.

Instantly I recognised the horrifying source of all our problems.  Bin bags had built up faster than they should have, due to a housewarming barbeque we'd hosted.  These bags had not yet been picked up, and had therefore been sat in the back garden, fermenting under a blazing summer sun, the maggot equivalent of an episode of Grand Designs.  Escaping the night's cold and rain, these wiggling horrors were making a dash to the safety of my house.

MY HOUSE!

I snapped.  Hoisting the bags to the back alley, I cut them off at the source.  Then it was time to clean up.  With an iron grip I brandished the sweeping brush and made for the back door.  The head of a bottle of bleach appeared at the kitchen window, which I gladly availed myself of.  With a spray and then a whoosh of the brush the maggots were assaulted with a foamy bleach lather and the buffeting of the sweeping brush.  Hundreds, nay millions, fell to my onslaught as I brushed the back step and the actual door itself.  Innocent slugs were caught in the crossfire, sacrifices in the face of dire emergency.  After the berserker brush-rage cooled, the back step was clear of visible horrors.  Red-faced and short of breath, I retraced my way to the front of the house.

Removing my outer-armour as I re-entered, I surveyed the breach by the back door.  Still the internal monsters wriggled.  It was now nearing 4am.  These were desperate times.  We fell to our knees and with gritted teeth and toilet paper in our hands we began to pop maggots.

Some people have difficulty popping spots.  Popping maggots is several orders of magnitude worse.  As you lift them you can feel them wriggle under the paper, and when the squeeze is put upon them not only do you feel the pop, it is terribly loud.  From the bleach fumes and the wriggling, my stomach very bravely held on, but barely.  The maggotcide was an arduous task which felt as though it would never end, and memories can, even now, reduce me to tears.

We defeated the maggots that night, and they have not returned since.  But they are out there, I know it.  The buzzing of a common fly rings ominously in my ears these days, a grim reminder of the night we spent on our knees, popping maggots with our fingers.

The Three Plagues of Moving House

I've recently moved house which in terms of time and energy and also financially is utterly exhausting.  I'm finally at a point now where the process has calmed and I've been able to knead some normalcy back into my life.  But for awhile there I was dealing with all the hassle of moving into a new house as well as what seemed to be low-budget versions of the plagues of Egypt.

Within a week or so of moving in, still living out of boxes and the like, my eyes drifted to my front window, where my dog was sitting on the windowsill, intently gazing out.  What I saw outside was beyond the experience of my stunted man-child mind.  Wasps.  Every-single-where.  There were a few idling, still figures on the outside, but for the most part it was a full tornado of buzzing chaos that had visited itself upon my morning.  Incredulously I watched the postman go about his business, oblivious to the madness around him.  That most popular of story archetypes, the Little Old Lady, strolled calmly through the bestingered, winged melee.  Was I mad?  Was this a crazed hallucination brought on by the stress of moving house?  What in the name of holy Jordi Cruijff should I do about them?

Cloaked in my own cowardice, I crept through the back door, down the back garden path to the alley behind my house and circled, pajamed, to the opposite side of the street where I beheld their infernal construction.

I journeyed to my place of employ, downtrodden, downhearted… down.  In my quarter century's worth of experience there was no solution to this problem.  Arriving at work I flexed my under-exercised raconteurial muscles and regaled my colleagues with my tragic tale of hardship.  Empathy, sympathy, kindness… these things I received verbally.  And heard spoken the greatest advice ever received.  Perhaps the best advice that will ever be received.

"The council will come and deal with that," she said.

Words truer than true!  As I surfed on the great waves of modern digital communication I beached upon the Council's website.  I logged my problem and by the time I returned home the wasps had dispersed.  It is unclear as to whether the Council dealt with this issue or whether the wasps simply caught wind of my betrayal and dispersed accordingly.  Regardless, I arrived home relieved and satisfied.

The next plague which visited me was the plague of one single leaf-cutting bee.  You may well believe this to be stretching the definition of plague to its limits, but coming on the back of the wasp fiasco, I was ready to punch any buzzing creature with my fist until dead.  The death of either me or the insect, I had no care for which.  One bee would not usually stir this ire in me, but for the fact that I had noticed that the thing was building a nest in the wooden surround of my back garden, wheedling his black and yellow way into the underbelly of my fencing.  I had visions of autumnal afternoons in the back garden spent supping serenely, visions of peaceful picnics prevented by a pack of prying pests, passers of tres, undoing my utopia!

He's gone now, though.

The third plague rode into town on the back of two kittens.  It was rather a spur of the moment decision to welcome the two feline creeps into our home.  The decision to add a kitten to our menagerie (prior population: 1 poodle) quickly doubled to two kittens as we decided not to split the last two brothers of a litter.  Far be it for me to compromise my rampant masculinity with use of the word 'cute', but couched in such a hedged sentence as this I shall, and have. How timid they first seemed!  They are now nosey, adventurous bastards.

When we went to pick them up (from a friend who'd already picked them up from their original home), we were met with an apology that these two silent babies "had fleas".  A little frustrating, but these things happen.  It took us mere minutes of the drive home to realise that "had fleas" was a wholly inadequate description of the situation.  They were essentially flea food, perhaps merely the packaging that the fleas we'd bought were being dispatched on.  They spent the majority of their first day with us scratching, the poor buggers.  Luckily, within a day the flea treatment was working and the kittens had died off, leaving us with the 50 healthy fleas we had always dreamed about.  HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHA.

For the weeks since we've had them the kittens, Sirius and Lupin, have increased their abilities far beyond their meagre 'scratch ourselves' origins.  They can now claw the curtains, bat the dog in the face, attack each other, scream for food and walk on keyboards; nearly a full house of 'adorable' cat techniques.  Braving the plague of fleas has proven well worth the struggle; it has been nothing but shenanigans from them ever since.