The hair-raising antics of flying ants

LAST Sunday week was Flying Ant Day on the Seven Heads of west Cork.

In the glorious weather, there was no question of “raindrops falling on my head”, as the song puts it. Instead it was flying ants alighting on my cranium, dozens of them, as I walked the cliffs over the sea. Happily, I didn’t have the same problems as my companions, who are less follically challenged than I am: ants became entangled in their luxuriant locks and the more they tried to brush them off the more entangled they became. I suggested going to a local stables where we could perhaps borrow a curry comb, but the recommendation was not appreciated.

Flying ants, the queens about half an inch long, were the bane of our neighbour in La Gomera in the Canary Islands. They came every year, but Maria, who was not young, had never become used to them. They would swarm beneath the outside light on her house in their tens of thousands and she would attack them with a broom or sometimes hose down the wall. In any case, in the morning, the ground beneath would be covered in shimmering ant wings, silvery and iridescent in the sunlight, a glittering carpet as light as air.