Now chaps, you know what some wives are like, they’ll get a bee in their bonnet about something and won’t let it lie until the ‘itch’ has been well and truly scratched…

I know, I was married to two such women, on separate occasions I should add, but both of the ladies concerned seemed to buy items with their eyes instead of their brains!  Now we know that the thong-wearers are wired differently to the boxer shorts brigade, but really, at what stage in their lives does the fairer sex lose their common sense cell?

If it makes them go, “Aaah,” they’ll but it, and when you’re married there can be an awful lot of “Aaah” moments during the course of one week.  Case in point – my first little hooded cobra used to ride horses and belonged to a local stable.  Now I didn’t have a problem with that until I discovered that we had more straw in our car than the stable had!  And there’s nothing quite like taking a drive only to find that the interior smells like a dung heap!

So, to the “Aaah” momemt in question – I came home from work to find we had two extra menbers of the family, one black and the other a ginger tom.  A cat at the stables had had a litter and there were seven kittens each looking for a new home.  My wife’s first line of defence was, “They didn’t cost anything.”  “Great,” I replied, “What about the bloody smell?”  Fluffy and cuddly they may have been, but being born in a rat-infested stables most definitely had its down side.

Everything I said after that was taken as a direct insult to my wife’s judgement.  You can’t win, so this is where us chaps start to learn the benefits of playing the ‘long game’, because saying, “See, I told you so – out loud,” will only go on to cause more grief in the long-run.  I waited and waited before making my final pitch.  “What about the fleas,”  I said, “they must be coated in them?”  Thinking she had the upper hand and an answer to everything, my ex replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll buy some flea collars tomorrow.”

Now, while purchasing a brace of flea collars seemed like the best way forward at the time, I can assure you that it wasn’t.  On the box it said, this collar will kill every single flea on your infested cat.  Take it from me – it doesn’t!  It might stun them initially or give them a nasty migraine, but on the whole, these fleas must have seen what was coming and said to each other, “Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m off.”  And as soon as collar one was in place, around 100 blood-sucking critters disembarked on mass.  And you won’t be surprised to hear that much the same thing happened when collar two was applied.

Once they regrouped on our tabletop they soon realised that there wasn’t a whole heap of cover.  So, platoon by platoon, they leapt for their lives and then buried themselves in our front room carpet.  Now it’s it’s a funny thing, once they’d made themselves at home you become desensitised to the fact that you have a potential problem on your hands.  There was no scratching or itching, and after a week the word ‘flea’, didn’t enter our minds.  And right there is the weak link in the whole situation that’s about to befall you.

Even your first ‘itch and scratch’ moment doesn’t jog your memory, because it only happens once.  Unbeknown to yourself, your partner has had an ‘itch and scratch’ moment all of her own, but doesn’t mention it because again, it only occurred once.  A few days later you’re sitting in the same room and you’re both intermittently scratching different parts of your bodies, but you still haven’t twigged that you’re doing it simultaneously now!

Then, quite by chance, you’re flicking through the channels on the TV, and during a pause in consentration you find yourself listening to part of a documentary that’s just about to reel off the facts surrounding the lifecycle of the flea.  And it’s only then that the copper coinage to the value of a hundreth of a pound falls from the sky, and lands on auntie Muriel’s favourite glass figurine of a dolphin, knocking its tail off! 

Then, when you learn that all you need is one female to start a massive infestation, because she can knock out up to 50 eggs a day, you start to sit up and take stock of the problem that’s lying in wait.  Do you call the flea man?  No!  Why?  Because your wife, who brought the problem into the flat, the problem that was free, couldn’t bare the shame of a van pulling up outside the flat with the words ‘Pest Control’ emblazoned on it, just in case the neighbours see it draw up.

Then there’s a lull in the itching and a marked cessation in the scratching department, and all talk of hopping blood suckers drops right off the agenda – but only until I went out for a few beers, came home and slept in my socks.  The very next day at work I couldn’t understand why I was scratching so much however, it didn’t take long to backtrack the story. 

If one lady flea can produce about 50 eggs a day, that roughly 350 a week.  Add another eight or nine days to that, and you can see how quickly you could open your own flea farm.  Well lucky old us!  We started with about 200 of the little buggers, and if only 25% on them were ‘bra wearers’ it wouldn’t take long for them to overrun our flat.

Add the fact that they can sense footsteps and jump, by ratio, a 1000 time further than humans, and it’s not surprising that they made it up the non-carpeted stairs to our bedroom!  Then muggings comes home a few sheets to the wind and hits the pit, still wearing his socks.  Wallop!  It’s morning and I’m late, I grab the first set of clothes I can find and head off to work.  After a phone call to my wife, these poignant factors were enough to push her ever closer to the Yellow Pages and a section marked ‘Ankle biter obliterators’ 

The call goes through, and a few hours later your savior arrives with a spray gun in a luminous pink van with the words  ‘INFESTATION KILLERS’ slapped on both sides of the vehicle in Day-Glo green!  But hey, by then you’d quite happily swap your wife for a canister of insecticide and forty quid and watch as she and the flea man disappeared into the sunset!  My advice to you… never under estimate the power of even the smallest of females!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2011 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Neils Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.