God has got it in for me this week. After the plague of sores (three of them which constitutes a plague) that he has sent me, now comes a plague of ants.
I got down to the kitchen this morning to find that maybe twenty or thirty ants were scurrying around on my work tops and in my sink. OK, it's a mild plague compared to the locusts and stuff that he sent that time, but I haven't done anything to massively offend the Creator. I have just narked him off a bit by breaking a couple of his commandments and constantly banging on about how he doesn't exist.
The ants were getting in through a small hole under the window, so I had some fun blocking the hole up with match-sticks and then watching the stupid clueless ants get all confused and upset when they couldn't get back through the hole they'd come in by. Ha ha. The idiot ants. I am much better than them. I then proved my superiority by squashing the ants with my finger. That would teach them for coming into my house and eating my crumbs. Yeah, OK, I probably wasn't going to eat the crumbs myself, but they are still mine. The thing that had probably attracted the ants in was the remains of a takeaway that I had had last night. This was all bagged up on a tray and quite a few ants were scurrying around that. So I threw the cartons away in the bin outside (which in hindsight I should maybe have done last night), nobly allowing the ants that were still crawling over the boxes to live, albeit in a new environment several ant miles away from where they had previously lived. But the ants that were still on the tray were not so lucky. I put the tray in the sink and turned on the taps, washing maybe eleven ants to an horrific death. I laughed as they died and flew down the whirlpool of the plughole. The ants had dared to disrespect me and my home and my crumbs and now they were paying.I am sure some of you (like the sensitive animal lover Andrew Collings) will feel the death penalty was too much for this crime. The ants, you will argue, were only following their instincts and a custodial sentence would have been more appropriate. But I haven't got time to gather up ants and keep them in a box until they have learnt their lesson (and would they learn or would they just do the same thing again?) and I think that the deaths of a few of the ants will probably serve as a warning to the ones that I allowed to live (in exile) and they might go about mending their ways. I think ants will come to look upon me as a kind of Jesus figure. An evil Jesus figure, but a Jesus figure nonetheless.
My ant brutality did remind me of what a little shit I was as a child. I used to enjoy going into the garden and torturing and murdering any insects that I could find - I never went further than hurting insects or worms as they couldn't really fight back. I remember particularly enjoying laying out some newspaper, waiting for ants to walk on to it and when enough of them were aboard I would set fire to the paper and laugh as they burned. These were ants that hadn't got above themselves by thinking that they cold come indoors - these were ants who had done nothing wrong and were living in the ground where they belonged. I didn't have the ethical and moral compass then that I have now.
In fact I think my guilt at these actions as well as religious confusion (I essentially was an atheist from early on, but scared that I was wrong and that was angering God - thankfully I no longer think that way - oh no) which led to me taking the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill" a bit too literally that led me to become a vegetarian. Well it was part of it. I felt guilty for the needless murder of those ants. What if one of them would have grown up to be the ant version of Shakespeare? He might have written a play about eating a crumb that would have helped the ant civilisation move on. As it was any ant that may just survived the burning would probably have gone on to be the ant Osama Bin Laden, declaring war against all humanity - maybe encouraging ants that were once good and knew their place to go into people's houses and eat bits of their leftover takeaways. And then all I have done is to will the ants or lock them away in my Guantanamo dustbin and exacerbated the problem. If ants ever take over the world it will probably be directly my fault and sorry about that. And for wiping out any chance of ant theatre really kicking off.
