Karma

Living deep in the French countryside is wonderful, it's peace and quiet and green and rolly; it's gooey cheese, crusty bread and meaty meat BUT it's buggy as well. Apologies to readers in Australia who have bugs and spiders the size of houses, but us temporate climate townies just aren't used to it. Mostly the spiders are just those spindly ghosty ones that are not too bad except they spread their pesky webs all over my maison; and don't tell me they eat all the insects because clearly they do not, because there are hundreds of them of varying sizes and colours, flying and otherwise moving their families into live with us. Spiders clearly have a good PR agency working for them but I don't believe a word of it and because they are no damn good at their job I vac them up with a woosh or bash them with my shoe if I can bear to get that close. Stewart has designed a fly catching method with the Dyson too, he creeps up behind them where their compound eyes can't see and sucks them right up, whether they then become a meal for the ghostly spiders I don't know.

I am worried about the bad karma though, a few vile specimens with antennae far too long for their bodies take some bashing and keep on struggling to live, I apologise profusely as I bash them again and again but I am sure I am playing with fire, fates wise. Despite this am hoping that the other blight of the region the dreaded mosquito is going to leave me alone this summer, usually I am to them as egg and chips or fois gras entier is to me but I have filled my blood with very nasty chemicals and maybe I don't taste so good anymore. For that reason I am risking venturing outside at night without benefit of anti-moustique, worrying of course that the insect world will rise up as one in vengeance for their squashed cousins and eat me alive.