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?
