I opened the bedroom door and Danny scuttled in in front of me. At that exact moment I noticed the scorpion scuttling across the bedroom towards Danny’s bare feet. I squeaked an expletive. They both ignored me and continued along their converging trajectories. At the point of intersection Danny’s foot came down, and you couldn’t have inserted a fag paper between little boy and toxic beast. But they didn’t touch.
This is the moment where you realise the fallacy of statistics. Yes, it is true that alacran (our local scorpion species) stings are rarely fatal. But if you’re the one it happened to, then as far as you’re concerned it happened to you one hundred per cent. This time whether by fate or divine intervention, providence was a hundred per cent on our side, and once my heart started beating again, we all lived to tell the tale. Apart from the scorpion which was dispatched with a swift biff with a training shoe. An Englishman’s home is his castle after all and having venomous creatures roaming around it is just not cricket, old chap.