The To Do List

I was about twelve when the whole video nasty/horror film craze happened. Mates would come into school claiming to have seen “Friday-the-thirteenth-I-spit-on-your-grave-let’s-murder-the-teenagers-staying-in-the-house-III” round at some mysterious “friend’s” house and then regale you with fantastical stories of what they had seen. I knew they were lying and they knew I knew they were lying but it was as though there was a written agreement between us all that we should never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Spurred on by this horror craze I decided that I would do my bit for playground storytelling by reading horror books (my parents at the time didn’t have a video player and even if they had the last thing that they would let me watch would have been a horror film) and my favourite of these was the paranormal story The Amityville Horror in which there was a memorable scene where one of the characters in the book enters an attic room to discover the spookiest of propositions: a room full of flies in the middle of winter!!! Quite why a house being held of the grip of a paranormal experience should necessarily result in an out of season fly infestation I’m not sure, but it was definitely scary and this scene in the book always stayed with me so you can imagine how I felt when I discovered that my own attic room had been taken over by out of season bees!

They started slowly at first. I’d be sitting at my computer staring at the screen then all of a sudden I’d hear a low droning noise and I’d look up to discover that I was now eye to compound eye with a bee. Now I’ll admit that even though it was a bee and not a wasp my second instinct was to kill it (my first, was as always to scream like a girl) and within a few moments I had rolled up my copy of the Sun and was primed to send this bee on a one way trip to meet his maker when I suddenly recalled the fact that I had seen Bee Movie with my kids and quite liked it. How could I destroy an insect that had once been voiced by Jerry Seinfeld? Plus there was the fact that I’d recently read that in the UK and the US the bee population had been dramatically reduced due to a bad weather and a virus. I couldn’t kill this bee. It would be wrong.

So in the end I opened all the windows and told the bee that I was going to make a cup of tea and that he should be gone by the time I got back. Not only did he not go by the time I returned with my cuppa but also to add insult to injury he had invited six bee mates to join him. Now given the fact that it was November I knew these bees hadn’t come from outside because as any schoolboy knows bees sleep in November so I found myself asking the question: where are all these bees coming from? To which the answer I discovered yesterday when I finally got round to it, was behind the halogen light fittings. Anyway, I called a man and he came round and said, “Yeah, you’ve got bees behind your halogen lights.” So I said, “Well can you get rid of them for me?” and he said, “Nah, mate. Bees are protected by law.” And then he paused and added, “Are they bothering you?” And so I said, “What? Am I bothered by six bees flying round me head while I’m trying to work?” And he said, “Yes?” because he seemed to have missed the irony in my voice and so I just sighed and told him that I’d learn to live with it and so as I write the bees are still here.