Time for the wasps to buzz off

Wasps: wearing the same stripy jumpers as bees doesn’t fool anyone - they’re the soccer hooligans of the insect world.

It definitely feels decidedly autumnal this week, which means two scary and unpleasant things are pretty much over; me wearing shorts, and the preponderance of angry, irritable, wasps who want one last fight before winter arrives.

If there’s a defined scale of despicability, our waspish chums are right near the top, battling it out for the “pointless but ruddy annoying” award with the daddy-long-legs.

These surly, benefit-free, bee impersonators have seemingly no redeeming qualities. This is largely because flying at your face isn’t something that generally starts you off well in the likability stakes. Having the ability to sting and repeating the face-flying thing guarantees it, and also encourages violent retribution.

Sitting next to the open window in my office has allowed me to observe their modus operandi first hand, over an extended period of time. I can safely say that your average Cumbrian wasp’s day goes like this:

Get up – in a bad mood.
Spot balding newspaper columnist pretending to work.
Fly in through open window aiming for ear (hair will do if you miss).
Avoid flailing limbs and high-pitched screaming, loop round and aim for face.
Repeat several times.
Laugh whilst he picks up an important document and attempts to hit you with it, but knocks over his cappuccino instead.
Repeatedly headbutt closed window, right next to the open one.
Time permitting, try and pick a fight with a neon tube.
Mysteriously vanish, leaving an air of nervous tension in the room.
Hand baton on to a friend.

On a bad day, their sheer numbers have resulted in three grown men in a confined space slashing at the air with rulers, like some kind of impromptu flashmob in the stationery section of WHSmith.

Still, if that induces nightmares, it’s nothing compared to what was discovered in the loft of a home in Corby recently, according to the Northampton Chronicle.

The property was being renovated, and whilst empty a nest had been built. A big nest. A 1 metre wide nest, with it’s own bespoke entrance tunnel built down to the eaves. Try not to imagine a large barrel containing wasps. Too late.

Apparently, the average nest holds about 3,000 grumpy, buzzing, stinging-machines. This one possibly had up to 10,000 in it. Going on the sheer size, I’m imagining it also had lifts and valet parking.

Happily for all involved it had been vacated. In my foolish youth I once put on 3 layers of clothes, a balaclava and swimming goggles and clobbered a small nest with a tennis racquet. I’d have needed every player at Wimbledon to have stood a chance against this monster.

Makes you wonder, though. Where did the 10,000 wasps go? And what’s making that loud buzzing noise outside my window?

I’ll just open it and see...

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 30th of September 2016, where it was re-titled "Stung into a wasp diatribe". I know this because *fanfare* I'm receiving copies of the paper again. Hurrah!

According to @BrockwayVoila, I missed as episode of The One Show this week that seemingly showed wasps in a more positive light. Really? Doubt it would have swayed me - Stripey gits.

(CD A-Z: Jethro Tull, "Through The Years". A budget compilation with a different version of "Living In The Past". Ah...)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog