It had been a good day and when I saw a little ant run across my desk I thought to myself, in a rare fit of Buddhist kindness, that the poor little fellow hadn't much of a life, really. The desk must have seemed endless to him and he didn't know what awful dangers, such as myself, were lurking nearby. So I picked him up on a postcard and carried him out to the garden and put him in a big pot that contains a fuchsia. There, now he would have grand things to eat - old fuchsia leaves, earth grubs. . . much nicer than a dull old desk.
Feeling very proud of myself and full of virtue I went back to work and discovered 12 more ants crawling up the screen of the word processor.
Suddenly we had distinct change of policy.
No more mercy dashes to the potted fuchsia.
The ants were too many and too insistent and in the wrong place. I went for the Parazone and a J-cloth, and having nearly asphyxiated myself I looked at the surface to see had I dealt with them as quickly and efficiently as I believed.
The ants loved the Parazone. They reeled a bit at first - as we all might with a first, strong gin and tonic - but they obviously took to it greatly, and sent out a message for their friends to come and join them. The other ants heard somehow that the good times were rolling on my desk and they arrived eager to share the delicious taste of bleach.
The day looked a lot less good somehow and I withdrew a bit to consider my position. Now, I don't like them. We're not meant to like things with six legs and antennae. Nobody enjoys seeing things much smaller than us scuttling around the place, particularly around our place.
And it was actually a question of numbers. One ant was all right but this amount was not. And I had the feeling the ant which had been carried outside had long said farewell to the fuchsia leaves and had come back to join the bleach sniffers. And of course there's the huge guilt feeling: this must mean I have a filthy house. Why else were crawling insects marching towards it? Quite obviously it's a place that any infestation would love to settle in.
This was doubly distressing because I was expecting a colleague to arrive from London and we were going to be spending some six hours at this desk going through a manuscript page by page.
The thought of having to beat the ants off with a ruler before we could even read the thing was not something I wanted to contemplate. Nor did I fancy what might be reported about the standards of hygiene in modern Dalkey.
Sitting well back from the desk full of reeling, happy ants, I reached cautiously for the telephone to ring Eanna Ni Lamhna, of RTE's nature-programme fame, who would be the right person. She would know what was politically correct about ants without being foolishly sentimental and asking me to give them muesli for their breakfast or anything. But there was only her answering machine. In times of stress nowadays, I have a big mug of tea and turn on the radio. So, having examined the mug very carefully for fear of drinking a dozen ants accidentally, I turned on RTE.
A huge ant discussion was taking place. I looked at the radio beadily for a bit. People are always imagining they hear voices on the radio talking to them: it's a fairly common paranoia apparently. But I listened very carefully and they really were talking about ants.
And wonderful, healing words came out of the little radio: "It doesn't mean your house is dirty." The man said it twice. I could have leaped into the radio and hugged him. Apparently it's just that people have patios near their houses more nowadays, and grouting between tiles. Yes, yes, I was saying, looking out at the roof garden with its tiles, all this is true. The ants are just looking for food, that's why they come indoors, the calming voice said. Yes, well. That's as may be. But you'd wonder why can't they eat the grouting and the things outside where nature intended them to be? This point was not properly dealt with, I felt.
Anyway, they moved on to a pest person, and the pest person said that there were indeed far more inquiries about ants at the moment, a lot of people had been inquiring. Anxious even.
Well, that makes you feel better. Up to a point. At least the house isn't dirty. It has been said on the radio, so it must be true. And there's somehow comfort in knowing that they've got into other people's places.
But not huge comfort.
Remember the Hitchcock film The Birds? It wasn't that much help to know that they were in everyone else's house pecking their eyes out, too.
There's always a really good, kind person on these programmes and he came on and said that ants were fantastic little creatures and hugely helpful in the ecosystem. They ate dead insects and they aerated the soil.
Yes, well. I looked at them marching up and down the screen of the laptop and forced myself to think well of them. Even if I could carry them all out, would I be able to motivate them to eat dead insects and aerate the soil?
The kind man was saying that possibly the best thing to do was to make sure they didn't get in in the first place and more or less ignore them if they did.
But then I thought of the six hours of work at this desk that lay ahead, and I took a magnifying glass and looked at an ant carefully and whipped myself up with hatred for their species. And I went out and bought ant-killer. The ant-killer was full of warnings. First it said: "Use only as an insecticide," which was a staggering instruction. What did they expect people to use it as? A deodorant? To ice a cake?
Then it said that you should wear rubber gloves and keep it miles from any electrical equipment and never let any of it get into the air, only on to skirting boards and window frames.
They'd obviously never come across an infested desk because there were further warnings about not putting it near furniture or matt surfaces. And that it would be detrimental to pond life and must be kept far, far from anywhere animals might feed.
And just at that point the two cats came in, knowing that all was not well, and that the Little Book Of Calm was badly needed. And the moment I thought of them licking this murderously poisonous stuff and lying dead beside the ants, all eight paws rigid in the air, my decision was made. I carried the ant-killer to the garden shed and all the pages that had to be gone through downstairs to the dining room table. At the moment, an ant-free zone.