Creepie Crawlies

Perhaps for some reason you're not so keen on your home country all of a sudden so you up and go to the other side of the world. Say to Cambodia for a couple of years. So what would be your biggest worry?

Maybe practical stuff like where you’d live, whether you’d have enough money, what the hell you’re actually going to do there?

Or emotional concerns, going to a place where you know no one and don’t even speak the language; whether you’d fit in, whether you’d miss your family and friends too much?

If you want to be properly scared, the fact that the Khmer Rouge were slaughtering thousands of their countrymen here just a few years ago might be a worry – not to mention that there are millions of remaining landmines just waiting for you to choose the wrong bush for a pee...

Or maybe you’d have more prosaic concerns about the climate, cuisine, culture shock , or just whether your postal vote will make it in time – all very reasonable things to fret about.

Well top of my worry list, rightly or wrongly, were creepie crawlies.

Frankly I can handle the heat, dodge the goat instestines and spar with the twenty-something vowels of the Khmer language - just please don’t stick a big hairy spider in my toilet of a morning.

Or indeed stick a snake into the board room at work, a sure way to spice up a day in the office. Or invite a family of genetically modified cockroaches to play tag on my kitchchen worktop every evening. Or station a scorpion at the foot of my stairs, undoubtedly sizing up my shoes as overnight accommodation. (Unfortunately all of the above have happened to me already).

And then there are the giant flying beetles. Really they should be pretty funny – I’m not sure what bit of evolution gave them flight, but their pathetically dainty wings are totally inadequate for their great torsos, making them lurch around like drunken Khmer blokes at new year. They should be amusing but they’re not, because getting a huge beetle in your face when you’re trying to listen to the election on BBC World Service is no joke.

Then there are their scarlet beetly cousins, smaller and wingless, but also red with two distinctly evil black spots on their armoured backs.

The real villain of the buzzy community here is the malevolent mosquito – as mentioned in an earlier blog, these nasties are to be splatted with extreme prejudice. As if their annoying buzzing and infuriating bites aren’t enough, the night ones menace you with Malaria and then the day shift takes over to threaten you with Dengue – bastards.

Which is where another creepie crawlie actually comes in handy – the groovy gheko (not to be confused with the cool chameleon), not only singer of a song which, no matter how you try to ignore it, distinctively says ‘fuck you’ 6 times in a row and then falls silent, but also the heroic eater of mozzies. They do have a tendency to sit on the ceiling and drop their poop occasionally (which is incidentally another good reason to sleep under a mosquito net), but they are still the idol of my crawlie world. (I know guppy fish also eat mozzies, but they can’t really be called creepie crawlies, can they?).

My biggest crawlie problem at the moment is with ants. There’s no denying that they are clever buggers, but my admiration is limited when they use their ingenuity to successfully break into my heavily fortified YumBar tin – an act of provocation little short of the Thai’s claiming Angkor Wat.

To be honest, I was wrong to be mostly worried about the creepie crawlie thing; it hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as I expected - and I think you just get used to being surrounded by ugly, wriggly, heartless, poisonous creepy things after a while. Which I guess is reassuring for both me and for David Cameron as he tries to form a new government. Someone pass him the jumbo can of Raid spray!