Even flying ants get more action than I do

I’m unlikely to join the Twenty-Foot-High Club, never mind the Mile-High Club.

Flying Ant Day. This always gets me. When I was a child I was fascinated by the phenomenon. If you’re already interested in ants, and I was, Flying Ant Day takes it to a whole new level. My parents’ front garden had a rockery under whose rocks red ants lived; in their back garden, the same arrangement was the domain of the black ants. Red ants were cooler than black ants but they didn’t grow wings, or become supersized.

Once I left childhood I didn’t think about Flying Ant Day at all until my wife kicked me out: I remember sitting in my brother’s garden, contemplating the wreck my life had become, and all around me the winged ants jittered and weaved. They made me think of Salvador Dalí – he loved an ant – and this tied in neatly with the surrealism of my situation.

It wasn’t all that fitting, though, once I bothered to look up what FAD actually betokened. Well, I suppose it was, in a way. “An ant colony can only expand so much,” says the Natural History Museum’s website. “At some point a new queen will need to strike out on her own to begin a new colony. She needs to meet and mate with a male from a different colony and find a new area in which to start building her nest… They aren’t interested in people or picnics – they are just looking for a mate.” Tell me about it. “The large winged females and the smaller winged males are often seen flying joined together. This is known as the nuptial flight.” Egad, even the ants are getting more action than me these days. Actually, every single species on Earth, including those that reproduce by parthenogenesis, is getting more action than me these days. But isn’t “nuptial flight” a lovely phrase to describe a pair of insects joining the arthropod equivalent of the Mile-High Club?

My chances of joining even the Twenty-Foot-High Club, or however far the Hove-l’s bedroom is off the ground, are now nil, and I don’t see that changing. Anyway, flying ants mean something else today: pissed seagulls. Apparently the extra reserves of formic acid in their enlarged bodies make flying ants a prized delicacy for birds, because they are intoxicating. This year, Brightonians have been warned about seagulls, out of their minds on ants, wandering around the middle of the streets like football fans after a heavy home defeat. They become oblivious to traffic and are severely at risk of being run over. This can cause all sorts of legal problems if you run over a football fan and for all I know maybe seagulls too. A few weeks ago I tried to leave Brighton by train and the train couldn’t move because, I found out later, there was a seagull on the line. As it wasn’t Flying Ant Season, it can’t have been pissed; it must have just been bloody-minded. What astonished me was not only that they didn’t just wave their arms at the seagull, but that seagulls are a protected type of bird. Well, in the sense that they run an entire coastal protection racket they are, but in Brighton, at least, one does not get the sense of a dwindling population.

I didn’t see that many flying ants during Brighton’s Flying Ant Day; maybe they’d been eaten up by the seagulls; but then I didn’t see any drunken seagulls either. Or seagulls staggering around with their wings over their eyes going, “Jesus, never again.” But I have done some further reading around the subject and have discovered that Ozzy Osbourne out of Black Sabbath once snorted a line of ants in front of the band Mötley Crüe just to show them who was boss, and also because apparently they didn’t have any cocaine. Don’t say this column doesn’t learn you anything. I also learned that there are some scientists who express bafflement as to why seagulls should eat something that impairs their motor functions so thoroughly. I wonder what these scientists are like at parties.

I haven’t seen any flying ants in the Hove-l, which is fine by me as there’s a place for everything. Besides, by my window is a spider’s web and in it sits its creator, whom I have of course named Shelob. Shelob gets a free pass to build webs here because last summer I was typing up one of these very columns and because it was a hot and sticky day I was in the nude, except of course for my underpants. I have some decency. At this point a wasp flew in and I’m not a big fan even when I’m fully clothed; in the nip, I felt particularly vulnerable. And then the wasp flew into the web. The spider, which was smaller than the wasp, grabbed hold of it and, during a struggle which I had the presence of mind to film, killed the wasp and, over the course of the next few days, drained it of its juices in a grisly but, for the vespaphobic, if that is the word, highly commendable way. So the web stays.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the next flying ant appearance; something about their doomed, fleeting but passion-filled lives appeals to me. I feel like putting on a Richard Coles voice and asking: are we not all, in a very real sense, flying ants? No we’re not, don’t be daft.

[See also: Do we still need salt?]