Creepy-crawlies give me creeps

BROWSING through old columns this week, looking for my opinions on summer versus winter (which opinions are unlikely ever to change, given my inability to deal with heat), I was reminded of a study I came across about insects.

This month’s heat wave has brought them out. Mosquitoes, bladder crickets (a real species), thumb-sized cockroaches, fly-bynight moths and thirsty ants. And, as I observed four years ago, they seem bolder, bigger and in abundance.

I’ve never been a table-leaper. Mice, miggies, snakes and crawlies don’t offend or invoke panic. I value the circle of life and don’t see the point of histrionics.

But in a world gone mad on genetic modification, I can’t help imagining that creepy-crawlies are evolving into things with which we really don’t want to share our space.

Even bed bugs, for example. We’re a garden variety family – we have clean sheets and we vacuum. We even move the bed to dust, mostly.

But every night, when I snuggle in, the itch begins – and the evidence is plain come morning.

Being bitten by something too small to see with my naked eye freaks me out.

It’s even worse when the itch moves. And it always moves. Scratch your ankle, settle down and next thing, the small of your back is on fire. Get that, perhaps remove a rogue flea and squash it. A minute later, something’s moving on your ear. The worst possible sleep irritant is the silence broken by mosquito scouts – the ones you thought you’d squashed with a towel before turning off the lights. There’s always one behind the curtain and it always shuts up until you’re positioned under the duvet.

That said, I’d rather deal with those than a rebellious locust on the couch. I can’t even go there. Just typing the word makes me look at my shoulder, just in case.

Psychology professor Jon May has studied our aversion to six-legged thingies and decided that we’re completely normal in our dislike and distaste. It’s a primitive, biological response to their mostly dark colouring and angular-shaped legs – plus the fact that they scuttle and move around unpredictably.

If you’re a caveman out in the field, minding your business and evading lions, anything moving fast just outside the line of your vision will, obviously, elicit a fight or flight response.

We prefer insects that we can understand, says May – like honeybees and ladybirds. We even compose songs about them.

How often have you heard a ditty about a cockroach?

Interestingly, May also posits that humans don’t like angular shapes – we prefer curved ones.

Wouldn’t that turn the diet industry on its head?