Wasps

It’ll be wasp season soon —he says, well aware that the very idea of “seasons” is an increasingly futile one— and so any slight buzzing has me frantically scanning for something, anything, I can use as a weapon. I don’t think I’ve ever told the story of when I was stung. It was, I think, my Mum’s birthday. I can recall helping my Dad organise a surprise holiday for her around that time too. A special birthday then, her 60th? Anyway, they’d booked a meal for friends and family to celebrate, and we all got dressed up in our semi-formal finery and sat down for a birthday lunch. I can’t recall what course we were at, but a wasp entered the room. It zipped around, causing a fuss as wasps are wont to do, before it headed for me. With a well-placed swipe of my rolled-up cloth napkin, I rendered it inert and it fell to the floor. Huzzah! No more buzzing, although we couldn’t find the wee bugger, so presumed it had crawled off and was “gone”. Reader, it was not gone. A few minutes later I felt…