IF YOU GO DOWN IN THE WOODS TODAY...
...BE SURE TO LOOK UNDER THE TOILET SEAT
Our daughter, who's on holiday in Australia, announced this week that the Queensland beach near which she has rented a house is "the second most dangerous in the world" - apparently populated by poisonous jellyfish and visited by the occasional Great White Shark.
"What's the most dangerous beach?" I asked.
"I'd rather not know," she said.
A fear of nature permeated my Australian childhood. Everything - plant, animal and insect - was out to get one. Black and brown snakes and the particularly venemous taipan slithered in the dry grass. Funnel-web and trapdoor spiders lurked underground, ready to shoot up the trouser leg of the incautious pedestrian; the prudent wore bowyangs, cloth guards cinched tight around the ankles.
What Edward Abbey wrote of the Arizona desert went double for Australia. "It has been said, and truly, that everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals. Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.”
Particularly feared by those living in houses with outdoor privies - not uncommon outside big cities - is the Red Back, Latrodectus hasselti. A Maserati of archnids, its glossy black carapace feastures a dashing crimson swoosh. It hides under toilet seats, darting out to inject its deadly poison into…well, put it this way: "You have ten minutes to live," the wit Clive James remarked, "and a real problem about where to tie the tourniquet."
Long before I moved to Europe, I envied its benign vision of nature as reflected in such poems as D.H. Lawrence's Snake. Living in Sicily, Lawrence reacted as I would have done when he encountered an example of the local fauna.
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
Lacking that much courage, he threw a log, scaring it back into its hole.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Since moving to Europe, I've barely encountered a hostile animal or insect that hasn’t been made so by man. We never felt it necessary to warn Louise about snakes and spiders - and I no longer lift the toilet seat to look underneath. (Well, hardly ever. Old habits die hard.)
I'm trying to imagine Australia producing someone like Cedric Villani. World-famous mathematician, winner of the Fields Medal, he's taught at Georgia Tech, USC Berkeley and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as at the Sorbonne.
Villani is also an expert on spiders, a devotion he literally wears on his sleeve, since he always displays an arachnoid brooch on the lapel of the Edwardian-style clothing he prefers. Having theorised that certain mathematically constants are reflected in their web-building habits, he was rewarded by having a newly discovered spider named for him - Araniella villanii. Not content with these accomplishments, he was also chosen to become a member of the French parliament by Emmanuel Macron's En Marche party, as well as running for mayor of Paris.
I try to imagine Australians voting for a man who loves spiders, but it just does not compute. "I'm a Sydney-sider," runs an uneasy local folk song, "Ain't afraid of the Red Back Spider" - but you know this is just whistling in the dark. Believe me. In the dry grass, in that dark corner, under the toilet seat, something lurks….
Incidentally, Villani was bumped from the Paris mayoral race by Benjamin Griveaux, the official En Marche candidate, and regarded as a shoo-in until, on the eve of the election, an injudicious email messsage was leaked in which he appeared in a more natural state that is regarded as appropriate to a man running for office.