So, this is how the world ends – not with a bang but with the cold clicking of claws belonging to the 10-inch-wide mitten crabs that are terrorising the freshwater population of England. These rapidly proliferating creatures have cute fuzz-sheathed pincers that look like Victorian ladies’ winter muffs, but they can pin down a prawn and rip off its shell with nary a tremor. Before the mitten crabs, the scare was about bedbugs. Before that it was evil AI and killer robots. This is all in the past three weeks.
It’s as if the sheer misery, violence and horror of the headlines have infected us with such despair that we’re fixating on anything, big or small, that can do us harm, because it’s all feeling just a little bit like the Third World War, isn’t it?
When we’re not being bitten in bed or tormented by crustaceans the size of a Nando’s sharing platter, we’re getting a lashing from Mother Nature. The entire Earth ecosystem, Gaia herself, has completely had it and wants to shake us off like so many bloodsucking bugs. We’re still in the midst of Storm Babet, and before that it was Storm Agnes. Babet, Agnes – what is this, a little-revived mid-1900s Scandinavian play in which female domestics weep silently while starching aprons, before everyone dies of mould inhalation?
Oops – mould inhalation – I shouldn’t have said it. That’ll be the next thing to worry about.
Mask up, please
I’ve spent the week in bed with my second bout of Covid. I got my first infection in an oozing, seepingly wet greenhouse of a botanical garden in August 2022. I got my current dose of Pirola – that’s the latest variant, not a sofa from the Wayfair catalogue – on the tube. It was noticeable how many passengers were sneezing, wheezing, dripping, sniffling and generally letting their insides out. I moved away, but it was too late. Now I have heart flutters, chest tightness, fatigue, hives and such low appetite that all my ribs are showing. Since the government seems to think Covid is the Voldemort of virology – it is superstitiously fearful of saying the name out loud – I’m going to step in with a plea. Can we start wearing masks again? Just to show some consideration for others, in a world that seems to have lost its kindness.
The curse of Oz
Even the magical land of Oz isn’t exempt from human folly. One Terry Jon Martin from Minnesota has pleaded guilty to stealing The Wizard of Oz star Judy Garland’s famous ruby slippers from a museum. Hasn’t Martin seen the film itself? Doesn’t he know what happens to the Wicked Witch of the West, who covets the very same shoes? It’s the main subplot. For all her greed and avarice, the witch ends up being melted into oblivion by a bucket of water.
The Wizard of Oz is a wonderfully strange film. But it’s not as freaky and terrifying as its own sequel, Return to Oz, starring Fairuza Balk as Dorothy. In the film’s most notorious scene, a headless witch slumbers next to a walk-in wardrobe of sleeping heads, which all wake up and scream when Dorothy sneaks in to steal a powder capable of reviving the dead. The headless body also gets up and starts chasing her.
It all hammers home the point that you’re not supposed to steal from Oz in the first place. If Martin refuses to learn his lesson from these movies he’ll just have to slip on his ill-gotten shoes, click his heels together and repeat, “There’s no place like prison”.
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