Ant Phobia

I have an ant phobia. No, not an AUNT phobia – I haven’t any of those left. My phobia is about those tiny black things that live in seething nests, and their larger relatives that march in purposeful columns through the woods. And their vicious red cousins that grab your with their miniscule fangs and won’t let go, whilst pumping you full of poison. (The day following my 21^st birthday party, held in a boathouse in Wales, was spent at Bangor hospital where my jeans were cut off my swollen kegs and my veins injected with antihistamine after I had fallen into a drunken stupor on the river bank, with my ankles dangling in a red ants’ nest.)

Last week I bought ant powder and prepared to wipe out some bold bugs that had invaded my house and were gaily trolling past the wooden lintel, carrying eggs and disappeared beneath the skirting board. But this minor skirmish was nothing compared to some of the epic Ant Wars of the past.

The worst encounter occurred in a wood near the village of Graffham on the Sussex Downs. My (now ex) husband and I had gone for a post-lunch walk during a visit to his parents. We were strolling down a woodland path when a young girl on a pony came cantering towards us. I stepped off the path to let them pass, then suddenly, without warning, my husband threw himself across the path of the speeding pony, grabbed me and pulled me to the other side of the path.

“What the hell did you do that for? You could have got us all killed!” I shouted, when the sound of the girl’s swear-words and pounding hooves had faded and I’d stopped shaking.

“Look what you nearly stepped in,” he said, pointing. "You'd have died if you'd trodden in that." I followed his eyes to the other side of the path. It was moving. Everything was moving for yards around. It was one vast nest of large black wood ants. That’s when I realised that the rustlings I had thought were simply leaves fluttering delicately in the breeze had, in fact, been the purposeful movements of this vast ant army.

At once, I went cold and crawly all over. I felt sick. Terror swept over me. I looked down and noticed columns of ants criss-crossing the path and I said something I hadn’t said since I was two years old. “C-c-c-carry me.” The poor sod had to throw me over his shoulder and lug me back to civilisation, and when he needed a rest he had to hang me from a tree branch, from which I dangled from fingers crooked and frozen in a grip of pure panic. I truly think my ex was right and I would have had a heart attack and died if I'd gone off the wrong side of the path. Each nest can hold up to 10,000 ants and this was no mere colony, it was a continent!

On holidays in Scotland as a kid, I would stay snivelling unhappily in the car rather than trek through the forest with the rest of the family, treading between columns of ants. Scottish wood ants seem bigger than any other member of the UK ant family. They can swallow a Highland cow whole. They would certainly have made mincemeat of eight-year-old me. The torments of being locked in the old Ford Anglia on a boiling August day were nothing compared to my mindless terror of The Ant.

Eventually, at the age of 30-something, I had the bright idea of asking my mother if there was any reason why I should be so scared of ants. “Oh yes,” she said brightly. “It probably dates back to our holiday in Weston-Super-Mare when you were a baby. We strapped you in your pram and left you out on the verandah while we had lunch and you screamed the place down. In those days it was the thing to let your baby scream, rather than spoil it by running to it every time it made a sound. But you screamed so loudly for so long that in the end I thought I’d better go and see if anything was wrong, and I found all these ants had got into the pram and were crawling all over you.”

So there I was, strapped in and subjected to one of the worst tortures known to Man, the equivalent of being buried up to the neck in an antheap. No wonder I go to pieces every time I see more than one or two together. No wonder I hate bondage! And to compound it, I can recall being three years old and thinking I was helping Mother by bringing her tea cup and saucer in from the garden. As I toddled in with them, I noticed ants crawling on the saucer. I remember screaming, dropping the lot and getting bawled out for breaking them. So my fear of ants was compounded by being punished for being scared of them. How’s what for therapy in reverse?

A few years ago, I was recovering from a gynae op in Hammersmith Hospital. I opened my locker, got my bag out and found it was full of red ants. Then I noticed some IN MY BED! They had an infestation of pharoah ants in the hospital and the bastards had found the Kit-Kat bar which I had been keeping as a special treat.

I have decided that when I snuff it, I am going to be cremated. Anything, rather than be trapped in my coffin (maybe not even dead, but waking from a coma and finding I’d been buried prematurely) and having the thing fill up with ants. I saw an episode of CSI in which one of the agents was trapped in a box and ants were let in. I left the room and felt sick for the rest of the evening. Whatever you do, never, EVER, buy me a Formicarium. Or bring me back chocolate-covered ants from your holiday in some bug-infested country. A bar of good, plain Lindt will do. Though… typical, it always happens to me… I once bought a choc bar from a shop in Spain, unwrapped it at the airport, bit into it and found that it wasn’t an Aero at all, but the holes had been caused by some nasty grubs that had bored into it and the inside of the bar was full of caterpillar threads.

Excuse me, I’m just going away to be sick. Hey, I’ve realised what a good way this would be for me to lose weight. One look at an ants’ nest and I go right off food. Think I’ve changed my mind about that Formicarium.

For another amusing ant story, read Zoe’s blog on www.myboyfriendisatwat.com Her ants beat her up!