Forget about tax exiles — how do I become a wasp exile?

If these tribunals don’t result in someone going to gaol, I’m out of here,” my impassioned friend said.

I thought for a minute he wanted us to march out of the restaurant if CJ wasn't behind bars before the coffee arrived.

"I couldn't live in a country where one person goes to prison for snatching a handbag and all these bloated plutocrats are walking around free as air, taking advantage of one tax amnesty after another and even when they get caught for having Ansbacher accounts not doing time," he went on.

Good to know the bloated plutocrats didn't die out along with the running dogs of capitalism. You need a bloated plutocrat now and then for venting purposes. My impassioned friend would be lost without them.

"What about you?" he demanded.

I pointed out that even if he and I and all belonging to us fecked off to Luxembourg or New Jersey, it was not likely to fundamentally impact Ireland's deep-rooted structural injustices. Plus, our families might have language problems. In either place.

It wasn't the time to confess that I seriously consider emigration every year, at this time. I'll fearlessly take on CJ and every Ansbacher account-holder in unarmed conflict, whether in Stephen's Green or a TV studio, but am rendered speechless, paralytic and abject by one little guy in a stripy yellow jacket.

The first time my husband witnessed this, he thought I'd had a stroke and was furious when he discovered the real cause.

"It's only an effing wasp," he said, swiping at it with his jacket. "What's wrong with you?"

Which is roughly the equivalent of saying to the Lusitania 'it's only a torpedo, what are you making such a song and dance about?'

I've had car crashes, fallen off a horse, burned myself with boiling oil, scalded myself with steaming tea, scorched myself on the business end of the iron and nearly lost my tongue in a bicycle accident the details of which you do not want to hear, and I'd do them all again with warm nostalgia rather than meet one wasp on the rampage.

Because that's the trouble with wasps. They have road rage from the time they're larvae. Bees blither around like noisy drunks but leave you alone unless you aggravate them, knowing they're going to snuff it if they go for you, but a wasp is a venomous survivor, belligerent the minute he wakes up, always hunting for someone to sting. Bees contribute honey to the world, but wasps have no purpose whatever. They're also stupid. They've convinced that if they give out enough to a pane of glass it will stop being a pane of glass.

Nobody else in my family is phobic about wasps. Family lore has it that when one of them buzzed my father at a picnic, he caught it between the buttered side of two slices of bread and blithely fed the resultant sandwich to a friend. In deference to my terror as a child, though, he would half-fill with water unwashed two pound jam jars covered in wasp-attracting sweet traces of his favourite marmalade called Spanish Gold and put them on windowsills as traps.

There was a certain satisfaction to counting the curly corpses as they mounted up during August, although my mother maintained the jars actually attracted wasps to our garden who otherwise might have been happily stinging the neighbours. The other problem was that any time my soft-hearted sister saw one of them in the act of drowning, she got so upset, she would rescue it on a pencil and leave the bedraggled wasp in the sunshine to dry out. She'd have given them artificial respiration if she'd known how. I was really happy when she got married and moved away. The body count in the marmalade jars went up a hundredfold.

My wasp-provoked panic attacks are a continuing source of irritation to my husband. As a former psychiatric social worker, he knows all about phobias. But all that insight and education doesn't apply within marriage. After 30 years, he still thinks either that I'm putting it on or that I should get a grip. And he still swipes vaguely with whatever soft fabric is to hand and misses. Our cat, otherwise thick as a plank, has a much better strike rate. Scruffy is a good mouser, but really comes into his own with wasps, because they have such noisy fight in them. He's like the guys in the bodice-ripper novels who find the heroine twice as sexy when she's in a temper.

"What do you do when you're on your own?" my husband once asked me, stamping impatiently on a wasp he had brought down with a handy garment (I never wore that cardigan again).

You can't afford to answer that kind of question if the truth is a shameful withdrawal that makes Napoleon's retreat from Moscow look orderly, sobbing prayers and closing the door so the enemy owns the entire room or house until someone comes along to remove or kill it.

Of course, sometimes, the yellow-jacketed horrors just feck off by themselves. That's why I know this week is the anniversary of Elvis's death. Twenty five years ago, on the day, we were listening to the radio when a wasp came in the window and settled on my husband's shoulder, unbeknownst to him. I couldn't speak. The newsreader announced the King was dead.

The wasp took off out the window again, just as my husband glanced up to check my reaction to the death. I was sitting in total silence, face white, hands trembling, eyes swollen with tears.

I'd never been a fan, but it was easier to let him think I was bereaved over the death of a hip-swiveler rather than sick with relief over a departed wasp. Ever since, though, he buys me Elvis compilations this week in remembered sympathy. So I spend August thinking about emigration. To get away from blue suede shoes and wasps.