WASPS


LUV - Are you an animal lover? You are? Well, fuck off then. Your lack of consistency appalls me. “I love all living things,” you’ll ineffectively meep on the rare occasion that anyone can bear to look in the direction of your simpering, sallow, wet-behind-the-ears drizzle-puddle of a face. But you don’t, do you?


You don’t love all living things. Oh, sure, you set up a donkey sanctuary once and, yes, when you die you plan to give your life savings to your obnoxious turd of a cat, but look a little deeper. You don’t love all living things. You love all furry living things. You love all living things that could feasibly appear in a children’s book. You love fluff, you sappy twonk, and that’s it.


Throw a spider in your path, for instance, and you’ll scream and jump onto the sofa and try to scare it away by flinging magazines at it. Ambush you with a snake and you’ll wet yourself and pass out. And you don’t even like wasps, do you? As soon as anything even approaching a wasp drifts into your peripheral vision, you’ll start flailing about like Ian Curtis trying to walk barefoot over a mile of electrified Lego. And you’re wrong about this, because wasps are fucking excellent.


Wasps aren’t like bees. Bees are boring. Bees are Gary Barlow. Bees will toil away endlessly and pointlessly for their entire lives. Bees will keep their heads down for fear of offending anyone. Sure, they can sting you - but if they do it’ll rip out their guts and they’ll die, leaving perhaps a thimbleful of honey as the total sum of their life’s work. Bees have to be considerate and zen. Bees are shit.


Not wasps, though. Wasps are what bees aspire to be. Wasps are bees in leather jackets. Wasps are fucking excellent. Honey? Fuck honey. Wasps have no time for honey. Not when they can just mooch around bins, freaking idiots out by simply existing. Participating in a complex social hierarchy? Bullshit. Much better to fly into a classroom and scare the shit out of all the kids. Stinging people and then dying? Bollocks. Who’d do that when the other option is stinging people and then stinging some more people? That’s much better, surely.


There is nothing that I don’t like about wasps. I like how they’re so evil that governments rip off their colour scheme when they want to identify radioactive materials. I like the sound of the word ‘wasp’, and how sleek and hard and dangerous it is. I even like fat autumn wasps, the ones that stagger about on your windowsill at death’s door like a punched-out boxer and then die purely because they did too much living.


In summary, then, I love wasps. And if you don’t, I hope a million of them sting you in the poxy mouth.
- Stuart Heritage


HAT - I went to Ronda once. Have you been? Oh, you should. Ronda is wonderful. It’s a historic city stuffed with crumbling, Caramac-coloured buildings clustered higgledy-piggledy atop a bunch of mountains in Andalucia. Cobbled streets and Romanesque bridges. Orange groves dangling everywhere. Ancient bull rings. Oasis-like gardens surprising you around corners. Blistering orange sunlight and eye-wateringly crisp air. And - thronged around you - lonely blue mountains stretching mistily as far as the eye can see. It is literally, literally awesome.


Fucking APPARENTLY.


I don’t actually bloody know what Ronda’s like because I spent my entire day in Ronda flapping around squealing “fucking wasps, FUCKING WASPS” and trying not to fall into the crevasse. I only know about this lonely blue mountain shit because I came home and looked it up on Wikipedia. Motherfucking Wikipedia. Wasps spoil everything, the massive yellow bullying dickwads.


And why? What have I ever done to wasps?


It’s not like I go uninvited to wasp picnics and lurk around the Pimms waiting for wasps to say something charming and enlightened, then suddenly FLY AT THEIR HEADS. And it’s not like I then INSTANTLY DISAPPEAR, leaving all their companions to look on in bewilderment as they sprint across Hyde Park walloping their own ears for no apparent reason.


It’s not as though I keep wasps up all night by grizzling discontentedly at their windowpanes until get up and usher me out with a magazine. And it’s not as though I then fly back in just to sting them and it takes A WEEK TO HEAL. 


Fuck wasps. Seriously. Fuck them all in their stupid beetly antennae. Fuck them in their fiddly little wings. Fuck wasps for not contributing anything to the world, for laying their eggs inside other animals, for ruining perfectly nice afternoons spent in pub gardens. Fuck wasps for that terrible moment when you hear that shitty little ftzzz noise and realise you’re not alone in the room, for divebombing you on the Tube (why?) so that you flail around elbowing other passengers in the face like a crazy person. Fuck you, wasps, for becoming resistent to mild winters and hanging around ALL YEAR LONG, and for attacking me en masse at the bus stop JUST BECAUSE I DECIDED ON A WHIM TO TRY SOME J-LO GLOW, I WAS HAVING A FAT DAY, WASPS, STOP JUDGING ME.


Wasps can fuck off. And don’t even get me started on hornets. 
- Robyn Wilder