Battle Lines

Battle Lines
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 18, 2015

I am no longer the coolly self-possessed mistress of my kitchen. The ants I tried to befriend at Christmas have become zealots. I practice my domestic sciences in an atmosphere of fear and ambuscades. A bagel crumb left languishing beside the toaster becomes besieged within hours. With military precision, the ants blockade the west bank of my benchtop. Each day they emerge from a different crack. Despite my obsessive cleaning, I am under renewed siege.

At 6am, newly awake, I steel myself for what awaits me in the kitchen. I pad noiselessly across the cork floor and cast a bleary eye towards the sink. No ants. A small thud of relief. I reach for a teabag from Mr Twining. The red box remains pleasingly inviolate. I wait for the kettle to regain consciousness while I split a Hot Cross Bun and jam the halves into the toaster. I reach for the butter cloche and lift the lid.

It’s an ambush! My butter is a black and seething mass. Now I notice ants are pouring from a crack in the wall. They charge down the splashback and into the dish. I am suddenly alert and incensed. Sensing my presence (and recognising the Domestic Tyrant looming murderously over them), the ants race in all directions.

I snatch up the yellow slab with one hand, flick the hot tap and douse the butter. The black army’s front line charges up my arm. A suicide squad leaps into the oily whirlpool below. I hold the butter under the hot water trying not to flinch. A dozen ants try to hide in the nook of my elbow but I brush them to their deaths in the swirling sink. The pluckier ones take refuge on the underside of the butter pat but their footholds dissolve and they plummet to the plughole.

My hand is a greasy scald and three dollars worth of Watsonia has melted down the sink but I don’t care. With a wet paper towel, I mop up the stragglers. All but a thin black trail has now vanished into a pin-hole in the splashback. I march to the bathroom and grab the baby powder. Raining talc upon their blue-tiled bunker, I watch the rearguard flounder in white snow. (There will be but one queen today).

It’s a hollow victory. I awake next morning to find my entire kitchen is occupied territory. The ants have brought in fresh battalions. My sink is crawling with enemy formations. Two black columns, one advancing, one withdrawing, run the length my benchtop. This morning’s ants march over yesterday’s fallen comrades. The Axis of Evil extends to the dishwasher. I am newly enraged.

I cannot plan my retribution without a cup of tea. I flip open the Twinings box. Ants swarm out from under the tea bags. I feel queasy at the sight of so many crawling creatures. Panicking, I seize the box and bolt outside, flinging the anty tea bags onto the grass.

Hatred boils inside my brain. Yet again, I will waste an hour swiping and sterilising the kitchen. Walking inside with one salvaged teabag, I catch teenage son carving up a loaf of bread on the bench. “Use a board!” I shriek. “There can be no crumbs! The ants! No crumbs!”

“Calm your farm,” he says. With a sweep of his hand, he rains breadcrumbs onto the floor.

“Arrgh” I wail. “Clean it up! The ants! They’re taking over.”

Sleepy husband wanders into the kitchen. He squints and adjusts the crotch of his plaid pyjama trousers like a modern-day George Roper to my Mildred.

“What’s all the fuss?”

Teenage son smirks: “Mum thinks the ants are winning.”

“Hasn’t she heard of bug spray?” laughs my husband, as though I’m invisible.

“Yes, I have,” I interject. “But I’m not using spray in the kitchen. Unless you want me to poison your breakfast?”

Husband shrugs and slots a coffee pod into the machine. He leans against the bench while it gurgles to life. I admire his tartan panache as he absentmindedly squashes an ant with the whorl of his fingerprint.

Watching the ant-slayer, I feel suddenly protective of my tiny foe. We’ve been through much together, those ants and I. Over and over, we hear the same tiresome mantra from our nests: “What’s for dinner?” Perhaps we should share the spoils of my kitchen, crumb by crumb?

Next morning, my magnolias are drinking a soft rain. I wander into the kitchen and wake the kettle. I note the sink is still pristine; the benchtop a pure slab of white. I lift up the toaster, check behind the butter dish, peer into the tea box. Not a single ant. Not the next morning, either. A week later we remain ant free. I never dreamt I’d say this, but I kinda miss them.

The Ant’s Chance

The Ant’s Chance
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 13, 2014

My kitchen has become disputed territory. My enemy has drawn its battle lines around the sink. Each morning we meet at dawn, those ants and I. As I pad bleary-eyed towards the kettle, there they are: a black trail advancing upon my benchtop. A swarm of the blighters besieges a lone shortbread crumb.

Two lines of foot soldiers weave unsteadily between the crumb and the window sill, one coming, one going. I note there are twice as many ants as yesterday and feel a surge of annoyance. I watch three scouts march under the coffee machine and emerge next to the toaster, visibly excited by their discovery of a burnt sultana.

I lean over the six-legged troops, flick the kettle on and reach for a teabag. Sensing impending doom, the ants break ranks, abandon their trophies and scatter. I’m barely awake but already I’m plunged into the day’s existential crisis: will I launch a Mortein blitzkrieg or spare my antagonists?

By the time I’ve fetched the milk from the fridge, the ants are in retreat. They take turns slipping into a dark crack in the wall where the splashback meets the benchtop. Within minutes, all but a few stragglers have disappeared. My benchtop will be no Waterloo today.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like ants. I like stepping over them on the footpath as they make hillocks in the sandy gaps between the slabs. I like the big ones behind glass in museums, pinned to a mounting board. But when I find ants scavenging in my kitchen I dispense death on impulse. Afterwards, I feel a little throb of remorse. Shakespeare said: Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge. Do my ants deserve to die?

I know that in my 47 years on the planet, I have killed scads of harmless insects with my big, dumb, blundering existence. I pay no mind to the countless bugs who’ve slammed against my car windscreen, leaving a smear no bigger than a raindrop as their epitaph.

I’ll happily smash a blowfly or flatten a mosquito and enjoy the victory. I’m grateful for every cockroach corpse.

And yet I play favourites. I’m a fan of spiders. Spiders eat flies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The man of the house has talent – he can shuffle a live Huntsman onto a sheet of newspaper and slide him out the back door. Daddy-long-legs, no matter how long-legged, are welcome to hang their webs from our cornices. I could never kill a cute lawn beetle or an orange ladybird in stylish polka dots. My children know to rush a leaf raft to any bee flailing in our pool. But ants? Does an invasion of ants warrant a massacre?

On the morning of the ants’ first insurgency, I found several dozen of them mobbing a spilled sardine-shaped biscuit from the cat’s bowl. I swept them to their deaths with a wet paper towel. The next morning, the tribe had trebled its presence. I sucked every last one up the vacuum cleaner and felt smug. On the third day, I awoke to a plague of them.

I bought Borax, mixed it with sugar and lured the ants to my honey trap. I don’t know whose nest they took that Borax to, but it wasn’t theirs. So I called a truce to our war of attrition and tried diversionary tactics instead.

Mum suggested I sprinkle spent coffee grounds along their trail around the sink. But they forged a new track around the hotplate. I wiped down my kitchen bench with vinegar. They congregated on a wooden spoon. I blocked up all the cracks in the tiles with squirts of talcum powder and for two days, we were ant-free. “They’re back!” shouted my daughter the next morning, and pointed to a black conga line snaking out from under the fridge. By now, even the cat was getting antsy.

Perhaps I should convert to Buddhism and practice non-violence towards all living creatures. I’ll carry a broom with me for sweeping aside even the smallest insects from my path. But do the Buddhists know about Ross River Virus? Have they ever felt the sting of a March fly or been attacked by a wasp?

Last summer, the big Cape Lilac tree in our laneway spawned a poolside infestation of hairy black caterpillars. At first, we let them be. But they reproduced in such plague proportions that the kids and I felt nauseous from the constant squishing underfoot. The council sent in their exterminator and poisoned them. I didn’t feel one pang of guilt.

But I’m feeling sorry for my ants – they work long hours for little reward. I count myself lucky no-one’s looking down on me as insignificant and disposable. I should tolerate these harmless creatures a while longer. It’s Christmas, after all.

Tomorrow People

Tomorrow People
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 7, 2013

Procrastination is the tiresome friend you wish you’d offloaded years ago. The kind of friend who needles you for being a hopeless ditherer.

Procrastination has been my snarky sidekick since I was a teenager. Back then, it was a slothful habit that turned exams into last-minute cramming sessions and assignments into all-nighters. Finally, high on adrenalin, I’d bash away on Mum’s green Remington until 3am, fingers stained a chalky grey from copious blots and smears of white-out.

Now I accept my ineptitude as a personality quirk. We tolerate each other, procrastination and I, in a spineless sort of way. We both know I still lack the mental grit to make my life more efficient.

I would have written about procrastination earlier, but it never seemed like the right time. Last week, during a sudden cloudburst, I sat down at my desk as the rain pelted down, determined to put procrastination in its place. I flipped open my laptop and up sprang a clean white screen. Through the window, a streak of sunlight skimmed the keyboard. I noticed a layer of dust collecting around the laptop’s hinges.  

An hour later, having dusted the whole house in a fit of pique, I sat back down. I typed five words on the page: Procrastination is my worst enemy. There! A start! But those words rubbed each other up the wrong way with their lumpy rhythm.  I pressed delete and stared morosely as the screen emptied.

Looking up at the bamboo outside my window, I noticed a small cluster of ants gathering at the knot where a leaf branched out from the green stem. I searched the other branches for ant clumps. No, it was just this one hosting peak-hour ant traffic.

Every few seconds, an ant would separate from the clump and begin trekking down the plant, doing the usual meet and greet with another ant making her way up. (Worker ants are always she, Google tells me. Male ants are only good for sex – they laze about in the nest eating and making a mess and getting antsy waiting for their ant-sheilas to get home.)

I killed another half hour googling the study of myrmecology. One scientist was claiming that the weight of all the humans on earth was the same as the weight of all the ants on earth. Ha! Not after I lose five kilos!

Given the chance, I can happily distract myself from serious tasks by trawling the internet. Google is a wormhole in the universe – time accelerates when you’re pfaffing about looking up things you didn’t know you were interested in. Suddenly, it’s lunchtime. How did we waste time before computers?

The next morning, I wake up a day closer to deadline feeling uneasy. I berate myself for wasting yesterday’s free morning on dust and ants, and vow to knuckle down and finish the piece.

Then I spot the laundry bench spilling over with washing to be folded, and two loads of dirty socks and jocks waiting on the floor. A pile of bills is stacked by the phone. What to tackle first? Should I get the house in order or write about procrastination? Determined not to be waylaid again, I wedge my laptop under my arm, march out the front door and head for my local cafe. I tuck myself behind the back table, order a pot of tea and a chicken salad and wait for inspiration to find me.

Why do we allow ourselves to create pointless delays? Delays we know will make us worse off? Procrastination never made anyone happy: it’s a vice, a completely irrational habit. We indulge in it against our better judgement. “For goodness sake, get to work!” I tell myself.

While I fire up my laptop, I notice a young couple in furious discussion at another table. They’re just out of hearing range but I’m fascinated by their body language. I can see she’s on the defensive because she keeps shaking her head and her jaw is clenched. She has her arms folded and is leaning back in her chair. Her partner is pressing his bulk across the table to make his point: he’s jabbing the air with his finger and spitting out his words. I start thinking about Nigella and Charles Saatchi and how mortified she must have been to have him grab her throat in public. Procrastination has me by the throat. Again.

Perhaps stress is the spark I need to ignite my brain. I can’t just switch on my creative neurons at will. I have to be in the mood: preferably last-minute panic.

On the other hand, procrastination might be a necessary evil: it gives us the chance to incubate ideas, to mentally prepare for prize-winning brilliance. It might not be a time-wasting habit at all.

My salad arrives and the waitress points at my computer: “Writer’s block?” she asks with a grin.

“Yep” I sigh, “but I’m planning to be spontaneously brilliant tomorrow.”