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I am sitting indoors at the moment having my nebulisers. It seems even hotter than normal today and its only 10am! I’m also feeling a bit rough today so I’m not looking forward to moving everything over to the apartment in a couple of hours, one of the hottest times of the day! Everything is packed now and ready to go, apart from all the food in the fridge and freezer which will have to come out at the last moment.

The apartment looks nice but it’s very small compared to having the space of a house – just a bedroom, lounge/kitchenette and a bathroom. However it does have the most stunning view of the sea, which I will take some photos of. It is part of the house where the owners of this villa live and we will share their pool and garden. The biggest benefit to it though it that we can have it free! Then after a week there we can move back to this villa for the final two weeks.

Now there aren’t many downsides to being in a tropical country, but there are a few. Many of them take the form of insects! Thankfully Grenada does not have such delights as poisonous spiders or scorpions, but the little pests can still cause trouble and sometimes a fright.

I have just counted my mosquito bites and they now number over 20. The mosquitoes here also seem to have developed the skill of making their bites as large and ITCHY as possible! I seem to be constantly scratching or trying desperately not to scratch. I’ve tried three different natural insect repellents now (I don’t like using the powerful toxic sprays as they are absorbed by the body through the skin). Yesterday we bought a new one that it made on the island and contains essential oils of citronella, eucalyptus, pennyroyal and cedarwood. When the sun went down I stood in the kitchen spraying it non stop all over my legs in an exceptionally liberal fashion.

The first thing I noticed was that Brad seemed to be on the verge of passing out from the fumes. The second thing I noticed was that the spray was an oil and I now looked like a ready-basted chicken. The third thing I noticed was that the oil had spread out in pools around my feet and been walked around the tiled floor, thus rendering it as lethal as an ice-rink. Undeterred, I declared to Brad (once I had resuscitated him) that there was no chance of a mosquito eating ME tonight and went skating of along the floor to sit outside and eat dinner. But guess what? This morning I have another bite right where I had sprayed my foot. I just hope that after eating me the flipping thing had severe indigestion from all the oils…..

I had another encounter with a couple of unpleasant insects on the second evening we were here. Firstly I padded out across the patio in my flipflops to hang a wet swimming towel on the washing line. Suddenly underfoot there was the most enormous SCRUNCH! Thinking I must have stood on one of the little frogs that seem to be everywhere in the evening, I did what any sane and rational woman would do….i.e. panicked, stood on one leg and yelled for Brad to help. However it was not a frog that I had stood on, it was the most spectacular sized cockroach, equipped with antennae about a foot long. At least it had been. Now it was on its back and dead as a doornail. Funny isn’t it, how they say that cockroaches would be the only creatures to survive a nuclear holocaust, and yet at the sight of my flipflops they go all pathetic and die?

About an hour later, and having recovered from this introduction to Grenadian insect life, I went into the kitchen from the bedroom to get a drink. This time I was in bare feet and as I padded across the kitchen I froze as my mind made sense of the fact that there was a long black wiggly thing about a foot long, beside my feet. The fact that it had more legs that you could shake a stick at, hastily informed me that this was either a centipede or a millipede. I guess I could have worked out exactly which it was had I had the inclination to kneel beside him and attempt to count his legs (“9,835….9,836…..9,837….oh shit he’s moved!”). However at that particular moment analysing the mathematical arrangement of the hugewigglything’s legs was very far from my mind.

Having clearly learnt how to deal with such situations from the encounter with the cockroach an hour earlier, I clearly handled this matter in a far more sane and rational manner…..I sped across the kitchen, leapt onto a high bar stool and screamed for Brad at the top of my voice. Brad’s response was something along the lines of “Oooh hello, that’s interesting” at which point I informed him that no, it wasn’t at all interesting, it was quite frankly horrible and scary. So there’s me stood on a barstool being hysterical and making girly sounds like “Ooooooh it’s horrible! It’s horrible!” and there’s Brad with his caveman instinct coming out, trying to protect his over-sensitive woman by encouraging the hugewigglything to climb onto a magazine so he could move it outdoors.

Now I had read that the millipedes on Grenada are harmless but that the centipedes can bite, and are distinguishable because they are segmented. I decided to helpfully inform Brad of this fact (from the safety of my bar stool) and called out “Brad! Brad! It might bite. Is it a centipede or a millipede?” At this point there was a thwack and the reply came back “I’ve no idea but it’s a squashedpede now”.

Sadly I have no photos of centipedes, millipededs or even squashedpedes to delight you with, nor even giant cockroaches or teeny mosquitoes. So you’ll have to make do with the photo of the impressively huge cricket that decided to spend some time indoors with us yesterday evening instead. Enjoy!