Why does God hate me?

It's been a while, mostly because the chore of serving up a daily portion of my legendary acerbic wit became too much and I had nothing left to rant about. Check out jongudmund's addition to my rant about spammers. Much more amusing than mine, damn him...!

Several months ago, I sent one of my group emails about my travels in Ho Chi Minh, or Saigon or whatever it is that we are supposed to call it this week. The subject of said email was "The Roach incident" It detailed an encounter that I had had in a cafe with a rather large roach. Well, that has now been relegated to the ranks of "A slight inconvenience caused by a cockroach" because now I really have had a ROACH INCIDENT. I would just like to preface this by saying that in four and a half YEARS of living here, I have NEVER had a roach in my flat. EVER. I have also never thought of myself as phobic but two days ago, all that changed.

I got my patchwork quilt out again recently, having finished a few cross stitches- I had started a piece of blackwork but the stitch was quite complicated and I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm and then I remembered the patchwork so I got that out instead. Anyway, there I was sewing away and I happened to look up and out of the corner of my eye, right there on my floor I saw a massive roach. I didn't have any bug spray, and I didn't have any "roach hotels" so I asked myself what the hell I was going to about this roach. Now, I can hear everyone saying KILL IT...!! The problem is that to do that, you have to get close enough to crush the little scummers and I was not about to do that. You also have to clean up the mess, which I also couldn't bring myself to do.

So I came up with an elaborate scheme involving the roach and a carrier bag. Surprisingly, this scheme actually worked. Until I was that pathetic that I could not bring myself to pick up the bag with the roach inside it. Now, I've never broken out in a cold sweat before, but that's what happened as I was edging toward the carrier bag to pick it up and chuck the bag out of the window. And then the shuddering started.... I was quite surprised myself, I have to say, and I know what you are thinking but when you live alone and you want to go to sleep without the fear that some nasty little beast is going to crawl all over your face in the night, these things have to be dealt with. So as I go to get another carrier bag to put over the first one, the wretched thing escaped. Thankfully I saw it out of the corner of my eye again or this might have been a very different story involving me ending up in an asylum. It ran under a piece of furniture and I decided that I would have to wait for it to come out. I should add that it was about 12.30 or 1am at this point. I decided to watch another episode of Green Wing and wait. About 45 minutes later and it still hadn't come out; wondering what to do, I went and got the torch to find out where it was. And of course it was nowhere to be seen. After quite a long while of this I decided that the only thing to do would be to make quite sure it was sealed in and then buy a roach hotel in the morning. Unfortunately for me, the ROACH had other ideas and I was securing the closet doors it legged it into the kitchen. Which left me with a dilemma - leave my flat at 1.30am and sleep in the park with possibly more bugs, or get it out of my flat.

Despite the fact that it was really late, I decided to vacuum it and then chuck the vacuum onto the balcony so the roach could crawl back out and go away. Of course, not really being schooled in the ways of roaches, I hadn't bargained for the fact that it would bolt at the first sound of the vacuum, so that plan was out of the question. I finally remembered from an old joke -(How many roaches does it take to change a lightbulb? Can't tell, they scatter as soon as you turn it on.)- that the heinous things do not like the light. So I came up with another elaborate scheme involving the old curtain rail I still haven't thrown away, another carrier bag and my torch. The details are long and traumatizing, needless to say that they involve me, standing in the middle of my kitchen, dressed for bed, which is to say, not wearing very much. Holding the old, broken curtain rail which I use for banging on the ceiling when the upstairs neighbours are being noisy, in one hand and my torch in the other, herding the roach. Mostly it wasn't very co operative and at one point I really thought I was going to cry. At last, at about 2am, it went into the carrier bag and shaking like a leaf, praying out loud that it would not get out of the bag, I pushed the curtain rail through the handles of the bag and put a hole in the screen door trying to open it with the same pole. And finally after more trauma, the bag and the roach finally slid off the pole into the night. I felt slightly guilty about littering the car park but not that much.

After such a stressful couple of hours I was really wound up and couldn't bear the thought of turning the light out. Every time I close my eyes, I can see that roach with its antennae as long as my index fingers and even though I didn't have to touch it, I feel as though it is crawling on me.. I wonder how long it will take to forget...