Scorpions

It is extremely unlikely that you will have a problem with a snake unless you go hacking your way through the jungle, but you might get bitten by a scorpion.

A year ago I grabbed my shorts off the ‘floor-drobe’ and pulled them on. I knew it had been lazy of me not to hang them up the previous night, but didn’t realise that they had acquired an unwanted resident. Twenty minutes later I boarded a bus and, just as it pulled away, I felt a stab of pain somewhere extremely tender. “Ouch, what was that?” I thought before rapidly realising that, a bit like a Victorian society host, I had company downstairs. But what was I to do about this, surrounded as I was by a bus-load of people? I shouted for the bus driver to stop, but he didn’t hear me.

Well, call me indiscrete, but faced with the alternatives of either making myself a laughing stock or being bitten in the nether regions again, I pulled down my shorts, stood up and shook the culprit loose. He turned out to be one of the little brown ones, rather than one of the big black fellows. The smaller scorpions hurt you more, as they have venom, whereas the bigger ones just rely on their impressive-looking claws.

The remainder of the bus journey wasn’t very  comfortable, both because of an unpleasantly numb feeling in usually the most sensitive of spots, but also because of the sidelong glances and barely concealed giggles of the vehicle’s other occupants, who seemed to find it amusing that I had to continually cross, uncross  and then re-cross my legs.

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