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A neighbour has Lyme disease. I thought it was the kind of thing that died out with Nelson's navy and was surprised he wasn't limping around with briny lips.
But it is not something, I gather, that you catch from not downing enough lemons or by consorting with rats, but from your dog or, in his case, by simply strolling through a Gloucestershire wood.
You get bitten by a tick and become a quasi-syphilitic wretch, sans eyes, sans legs, sans mind. It is not the only hazard lurking in this pastoral Elysium. Newborn lambs can make you go blind; pigs can give you athlete's foot.
And then there is still the threat of fowl plague which, though forgotten, has not gone away. Last week a farmer in our village found a crow splayed out like the murderee in The Da Vinci Code, splat in the middle of his lawn. Two days later he found a
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Country Matters
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Never mind bombs, says letty wheeler, there are far worse things in the country
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goose and then a rook. "Never seen anything like it," he mused. "They just dropped from the sky."
I don't know enough about country lore to know if this is the kind of thing that normally goes on during extremely hot summers, but dehydrated birds, I am told, die in a different way. They fold their wings up like a pharaoh before breathing their last.
Clearly the answer is to head for the hills - the hills of Hampstead and Highgate, Finsbury and Tufnell Park, where the worst that can happen is that you get blown up by a terrorist.
Of course, there are lots of dangerous birds and creepy-crawlies there too, but they are mainly of the human variety, and at least the police might offer some protection.
In the country the only defences you have are a hat, gloves and a pair of long trousers. 
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 2, 2006
Previously: at the deep end of etiquette |
