Writing for life

Teaching children to appreciate wildlife, to understand nature and how all living things are connected, is, I think, an important part of their education. We always try to nurture the girls’ fascination with nature, and to encourage wildlife into the garden as much as we can. We feed the birds, put up nesting boxes, go on nature walks, regularly look through nature books and watch wildlife documentaries together on the telly.

As you might expect, wildlife is very welcome in and around our house… most of the time. This summer we’ve had quite a few impromptu wild visitors. Several birds have flown in through open doors or windows, and we’ve had the occasional bat and even the odd mouse in the house. I simply catch them, let the children have a closer look, and set them free a safe distance from the house. The same goes for spiders and most of the creepy crawlies that inadvertently make their way indoors.

Very occasionally though, a species ventures inside that is altogether less welcome. Luckily, with two pet ferrets at home rodents tend to give our place a wide birth. But houseflies are another story. At this time of year they seem to multiply at an alarming rate. No matter how fast we kill them there always seems to be a small cloud of them wheeling around the kitchen and living room light-fittings.

Our campaign against these irritating insects has included sticky fly-paper, electronic zappers, even noxious chemical sprays – but no matter what we seem to throw at them, within a couple of days they’re back in numbers, whizzing around the place and generally driving everyone insane.

The pitched battle with the flies is an ongoing annual campaign – one  I’m not sure we’ll ever win, but that we persist with nonetheless. Last week though an altogether more sinister six-legged visitor ventured into the house.

My wife was brushing one of the twins’ hair when she spotted something small and grey crawling along close to her scalp. She freaked out and called me. Sure enough, we had an infestation of Pediculus humanus capitis – head lice – and the school year hasn’t even started yet!

A head louse and eggs

Bane of parents everywhere, the head louse is a flat, wingless insects about 2mm to 4mm long, usually black, grey or dark brown that lives on the human scalp or in the hair near the scalp. These tenacious little parasites attach themselves to the base of the hair, and lay a large number of eggs that can be seen as tiny white/brown ovals glued firmly to the hair close to the scalp.

Although we all know that head lice are common – experts estimate that they affect one in every ten children at any given time – it’s still a bit repulsive to feel that you might have something crawling around on your scalp. So out came the motley assortment of treatments from the bathroom cabinet and onto the hair they went.
 
Head lice have apparently become resistant to many of the proprietary treatments available over the counter, but I suspect they’ve never been hit by anything like the cocktail we threw at them. It was enough to knock the stuffing out of the most hardened of six-legged nasties.

After what seemed like hours of scrubbing, rinsing and painstaking combing we finally gave the entire family the all clear. The infestation was over almost before it had begun. The itching at the base of my scalp initiated by their discovery would, I suspected, take a bit longer to subside.

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