My battle with an ant

At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away and amuse myself for three hours. The metal chairs in the waiting room were uncomfortable and there was nothing to rest my head against. So I wandered outside the 19-storey hospital to look for somewhere to lie down. Every outside space was taken up with parked cars, thousands of them everywhere you looked, some of them jammed in opportunistically at fantastic angles.

Eventually I found a patch of rough grass between two car parks. The grass was strewn with stones, rubble and litter but I lay down gratefully, resting my head on my folded hoodie. A prim pair of collared doves patrolled for food scraps discarded by those hospital workers who preferred to sit in their cars to smoke and eat their lunchtime roll. The sun bounced between scudding clouds. A kind soul returning to his car stopped to ask me if I was okay.

I was on the brink of sleep when I was bitten on the stomach by a very small, very aggressive ant. Sitting up, I found several others running feverishly around on me, presumably looking for a way in, though not in sufficient numbers to send me off to look for an alternative spot. I assumed they were a small scouting party. Another one bit my neck. I slapped him to death but carefully flicked off the others. Lately I have lost some of my former arrogance concerning the grandeur of my life compared with that of small biting insects. Also I was investigated by a military-grade horsefly with massive feet, beautifully liveried like a starling, but I gave it the brush-off and it shot off to try its luck elsewhere.