Since the Matt Dawson story the other week; how he contracted Lime’s disease from a tick bite in a London park, there are loads of horrible tales about these horrible things emerging everywhere. There’s the tale of the woman bitten in Golders Hill Park (5 minutes away from here) who contracted Lime’s too. Not nice. And yesterday the elder daughter, who used to have her own name but is now ‘Lila’s Mum’ and nothing else, got into a panic because there was a bug on Lila during a park walk. Holy shit! A bug!!! So this is in an open letter to her about ticks and life and death and the meaning of the entire universe. Because if ever there was absolute proof that ‘there is no God’, then its ticks. And mosquitoes. Snakes. Chelsea fans. Traffic wardens… Who’d have ‘divinely created’ that fucking lot??

Dear Lila’s Mummy,

further to your concerns regarding the tic ‘epidemic’ (2 cases in 19 years) and the whole Lime’s thing, I wish to illustrate a few points relevant to this matter.

Ticks are horrible little arachnids, like spiders, but smaller, they don’t make webs, they suck blood instead. Most don’t like human blood. Only that of vegans (I made that bit up for effect and to make tree-huggers in general question their belief systems). They like dog blood, cat blood, bird blood, but some are less discriminating and bite us too.

So you have to think of it like this. In terms of probability.

I walk on Hampstead Heath virtually every weekend. Long walks. In the green. Pretending I’m in the countryside whilst reassured that I’m just 5 miles from Oxford Circus. You have often accompanied us on such activities. And we walk in the proper countryside, when we have to, and in all that time, how many times have we been bitten by a tick? Answer: 0

And of all the ticks around, only a few bite humans. And of all of those, only 5% (total fiction) carry Lime’s. So the probability of Lila, or more importantly, of me! getting bit by the tick and contracting that horrible disease is 1 in 25,765,893,3478. Work it out yourself.

Furthermore, Lime’s is easily curable if treated with anti-biotics early on. And the bite site produces a fucking great bullseye pattern of red swollen horribleness that nobody could ignore. Other than Matt Dawson and the babe in Golders Hill who was misdiagnosed.

The moral is: shit happens. Just play the odds and hope it doesn’t happen to us.

I remain, etc, etc, etc,

Your esteemed father. Who walks to the tube station wearing a mosquito net and midge hat, carrying a can of ‘Raid’ in each hand.

A xxxx