The Horror! The Horror!

They sneak up on you.

Horrible. Horrible.

You'll just be sitting there, and then out of the corner of your eye you suddenly become aware of a black shape. And there it is. Just sitting there, with it's horrible squishy body. And you know that just as you are looking at it, it is looking back at you, and wicked malevolent thoughts are running through it's putrid brain. It hates you. It enjoys the fear it instils in you. It sits there waiting to catch you off your guard, and then it will pounce. It is evil incarnate and if it could it would kill you and every one of your family.

What? Spider? No, of course not. I like spiders. Spiders are cute.

No, we're talking something horrendous here.

We're talking about....

Slugs



My blood has literally run cold just from loading up that photo. I've had to scroll it off the top of the screen just to continue typing. And even so I'm sitting here a bag of nerves knowing it's up there, just out of sight. And it's only a photo!!!!

Hate them! Hate them!

I can't even walk past one. If there is a slug on the pavement, I have to step into the road. And if the traffic is heavy, well tough. Being crushed under the wheels of an oncoming articulated lorry is far prefereable than getting within striking distance of one of those evil little bastards.

And it's worse for me than most of my fellow slug-o-phobics. I'm a mountaineer, and British and Irish mountains are covered with millions of the buggers. In the Kerry mountains they're even a protected species. Protected? Who would want to protect the little shits???

Now, as you may be aware, I am a long-haired radical environmentalist pinko lefty vegetarian tree-hugging hippy with new age spiritualist leanings and as such I believe, like the Buddhists, that all life has worth and that we have no right to kill any of the creatures of the earth because they are all on the same spiritual path to enlightenment as ourselves.

But I make an exception in the case of slugs.

Kill them. Stomp them. Squish them. Crush them. Put them all in a big barrel and pass 50,000 volts of electricity through them.

Actually I now feel a bit queasy at the thought of a barrel full of slugs. Urgh!

I don't know why I have this bizarre phobia. I don't remember a traumatic incident involving a slug. I think, however, it stems back to someone once telling me that slugs laid their eggs inside their own bodies and that the baby slugs then ate their way out of their mothers when they were ready for the outside world. This turns out not to be true, by the way, but for years and years I believed it and was horrified because this involved:

a. Matricide
b. Cannibalism
c. Very poor taste. After all, it involves eating a slug, and that's fucking disgusting frankly, even for a slug.

So how do I cure myself of this phobia. Well, there are Banana Slugs, which apparently when you lick them taste of banana. And another slug I don't remember the name of which people lick because the slime contains a powerful halucinogenic. Maybe the cure is for me to lick a slug.

No.

Sorry.

I don't care if it will give me multiple orgasms. There's no way on this earth I am ever licking one of those revolting devil-spawn creatures! I am just going to have to remain uncured.