For the last few days I have been waging a chemical war against a massive wave of invaders. To make the matter worse, every morning the battleground is strewn with corpses of defeated combatants that do not have the decency to crawl off and die somewhere else.

I read somewhere that ants are intelligent. Don’t believe it for a second. This lot I’ve encountered just ignore which way the wind is blowing and teem forth every night to march forlornly around a virtual food desert, a kitchen devoid of anything but Nippon ant killer. And then they keel over and snuff it because the Queen Bag back at base succumbed days ago and is unable to order them to take the scoff back to their buddies in nest central.

Live ants do not like being close to their dead brethren (or is that sisteren?) so when the bodies begin to clog up the escape hatches that open onto the sink top they go low and erupt en mass across the floor where I stamp the buggers into the Italian floor tiles. The problem is so bad my other half thinks I’m intending to audition for River Dance.
Yet the ants still keep coming on. For every ant I kill another quickly takes its place. I think I am dealing with the formic version of the Evil Dead – a never ending wave of zombie ants sent to plague me for my pacifist sympathies – nature’s way of telling me that I, too, can be an evil murdering bitch when I put my mind to it.

So the carnage continues. In order to deal with the problem I have tried to put myself into the mind of the world’s leading military expert but Dubya’s mind is so small the hole where his brain should be has all but healed up. Therefore I am considering charging the little bastards for bed and board. And if they are supposed to be so fucking industrious why the hell don’t they wash up once in a while?

Deputy Editor to the rescue. At no small cost to myself, (i.e. the relinquishment of my oil concessions in Umm Qasr) I have negotiated with the Pentagon to have a 56th card added to the deck.