Wasps

in that hiatus between finishing uni, bumming around asia pretending to be a surfer and joining the world of gainful employment, i spent a summer pedicabbing and staying at my folks house in the suburbs. and very nice it was too. one particularly hot summer evening we noticed a barely audible crackling noise that seemed to be eminating from the corner of the room where the tv was. over the course of a couple of days we tried unplugging the tv and various other appliances in the room to find the source of the weird scritching, scraping, crackling sound but we never could quite pin it down.

a few days later i walked into the room to find about a dozen wasps buzzing about in there, on the walls, curtains and generally flying about. i thought there were enough to constitute a threat and justify the use of shock and awe tactics so i went next door to get a badminton racket. i swung with gusto and twatted about 5 or 6 across the room with satisfyingly fatal results. weirdly though the total number of wasps in the room didn't seem to be diminishing.

whilst going for a low level wall-crawler i noticed mid-swing and too-late, the tiny circular hole in the wallpaper by the fireplace that was spewing wasps, one-by-one. the edge of the racket hit the wall just by the hole opening up a 8 inch long tear that immediately started pouring hundreds of angry wasps into the room. i left pretty sharpish, skin crawling.

apparently the weird scritching sound had been hundreds of wasps scratching and eating away at the plaster board from inside the wall. they'd eventually eaten away all of the board behind a good foot square of the wall leaving only the wallpaper between them and the living room. I managed to stem the tide with some wasp spray and a big sheet of sticky-backed plastic over the tear until we got someone round to deal with it*. It was really creepy sitting there that evening listening to the newly vigorous scraping and angry buzzing coming from behind the temporary barrier.

• i used to get sent up a ladder with a can of deet and a net curtain over one of my mum's straw sunhats tucked into a jumper in a make-shift approximation of a bee-keeper's get up. in fact it was after one of these occasions when i received several stings to the face and arms that it became apparent that I too am allergic to wasp stings (not fatally like DJ - just temporarily disfiguringly so). after that we got someone else to deal with nests.