tally ho

Over the Summer there were ants in my kitchen. Not many, but enough to start the old UB40 song freely adapting itself in my head: 'There's an ant in me kitchen, what am I going to do?' I'm going to coax that ant onto a postcard, consign it to a glass ramekin that once contained a shop-bought dessert, and throw it out the window, that's what I'm going to do. Well I couldn't just kill them. They are so purposeful and industrious that they seem to occupy a sort of moral high ground – the thought of killing them immediately induces a William Shatner-as-Captain Kirk-style moral dilemma ('Do I... have the RIGHT to – destroy an entire... civilization?')

Of course throwing them out the window is not really co-existing with them, is it? God knows what they do after their two-storey fall is over – swap experiences? They must at the very least be a little shaken. And there have been occasional fatalities while I was perfecting the gathering process. It was then that the ominous words of the world's foremost authority on ants – Adam Ant – began to echo in my brain. 'Don't you tread on an ant, you'll end up black and blue/Cut off his head, legs come looking for you.'

Can that be right though? How can legs 'come looking' for someone? Unless ants have eyes in their knees?

It's worrying. Writing about this makes me feel a bit like that dentist who killed a lion and made the internet hate him. I have absolutely no interest in or enthusiasm for hunting but I can't help feeling a little sorry for him – I mean, it's so hard to keep up with changing social trends. One moment your trophy room full of mounted animal heads is the height of sophistication, the next it is being described in the tabloids as a chamber of horrors, the next worst thing to a serial killer's lair.

It's like the 70's. We're meant to be so over all that but then I turn on ITV3 and find the grisliest of all Hammer films playing in the daytime. No, not Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell – I mean On The Buses, wherein attractive young women by the score are falling for the hard-to-discern charms of 'Stan', a lanky streak of piss with rat-like teeth who resembles Max Schreck in the original Nosferatu – indeed, it is hard to account for his success in this field without resorting to supernatural explanations. Watching him and Reg Varney touch up a new female conductor under the pretext of adjusting her ticket machine straps I am horrified to realise that there must be people out there still laughing at this without irony. Maybe they should be hunted down?