Flea from fashion faux-pas

Fleas can get everywhere. They can live in sofas or mattresses. They can transfer to your skin by jumping 2 or three feet. That is the equivalent of you or I jumping 50 car lengths. They could be in the seat you are sitting on at the moment, climbing up your back, tingling through the hair on your arm, or possibly biting your ankles. They love the scalp, the warmth and comfort of a thick head of hair. If I was to tell you a story about fleas, then by the time you have read this far you would already have scratched your head or your side, probably more than once. See you are doing it again. Even though there aren’t really any fleas.

Last week I was bitten heinously. Some kind of sand fly that lives under the decking. Though it could quite easily be mozzies. These invisible ankle biters seem, in particular, to like my right ankle. It is evidently far more tasty than my left. Eighteen bites to three says it all. Just like with car thieves who nick your stereo, you never see it happening. The first thing you know is the stomaching sickening sight of the blue-green glass on the road, or in this case the red raised itchy lump on your calf. Something had turned my foot into the mozzie equivalent of a MacDonald’s drive-thru complete with free refills, so after 24 hours of me noticing more and more tell tale signs of the theft of my blood, I was beginning to get paranoid. Every little itch magnified in my mind as a huge flying bloodsucker bingeing on my AB negative. I awoke at 4am, itching like crazy, adamant that I was still under attack. There must be something in the bedding. Damn, that’s my ankle again. I scratched and looked. It was one from yesterday still playing up. And one on my calf, and then the other ankle. Arrgh. There are so many I don’t remember if they were there before.

I flapped the duvet vigorously to dislodge any monsters lurking there. Suddenly I saw something whisp out. A flaming mozzie. I envisaged him flying heavy laden, over-full with my blood, hardly able to fly, his belly dragging as he drooled in overdosed discomfort. Serves him right. Then he was gone. Was he working alone? Or was there a crack commando unit under cover under the cover? I had to know if I had banished him completely. I had to know if the itches were old ones or was I still being munched. So I got a biro and drew a ring round each and every flaming bite on both legs. ‘There’ I said to myself ‘If I find any more there will be hell to pay’.

And there was. The next morning I counted two further bites, both on my right foot. That did it. Serious action had to be taken. I scoured the bedclothes, maybe it was fleas. It was time to resort to my anti-mozzie night time attire. Long sleeve top, with pyjama bottoms, which are actually green surgical scrubs from the ER of a now-closed Devonshire hospital, tucked into long thick walking socks. There is no way they’ll come anywhere near me dressed like that… would you!

..And no, I am not going to put up a picture. You can use your imagination… which is precisely what got me so wound up in the first place.

Still scratching? I thought so…