With a scare first about the evil diseases that lurk in our dishwashers and then one about the terrifying nano-monsters that live in our beds, this week was not a very good one for hygiene freaks and hypochondriacs — in so far, I suppose, as such people are capable of having good weeks.
In dishwashers, we learnt, the problem is the hot and moist environment that creates a perfect habitat for the black yeasts, Exophalia dermatitidis and E. phaeomuriformis (as opposed to “Eeeee, phaeomuriformis” — which is a colloquial expression of surprise common in the scientific communities of West Yorkshire). In Britain 62 per cent of all dishwashers contain these poisonous funguses, apparently, mostly in the rubber band in the door. They are not, confusingly, huge and red with white spots on them, but invisible (though tending to black) and “able to cause disease in humans and frequently colonise the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis . . .”
Colonise the lungs? Ye gods. Run, run, mortal fools from the black yeast that would colonise your lungs, now and for a thousand years!
But it’s no good diving into your bed and burying your head under the pillow. Oh no. Talk about frying pan into the fire. Talk about being abducted by man-eating pterodactyls only to fight your way free and land in a tyrannosaurus nest. In your pillow — thanks to, surprise, surprise, the “warm, moist environment” (never share a bed with a biologist) — is a whole host of “infectious germs and superbugs”.
“If you had to come up with a medium to cultivate bacteria,” said some boffin you’ve never heard of from a company which is trying to sell synthetic pillows to the NHS, “besides a Petri dish with agar, a pillow is pretty much as good as you can get. It is a wet sponge that absorbs bodily fluids of various kinds providing nutrients, and is kept at ideal culture temperature by the warm body lying on top . . .”
The result of this is that within two years, apparently, fully one third of the weight of a new pillow is made up of dust mites, the corpses of dust mites, the turds of dust mites, dead skin and bacteria. And just in case people were not getting the message (“You’re all filthy! Your homes are filthy! You’re all going to die!”), reports were illustrated with those familiar photographs of dust mites and bedbugs blown up to ENORMOUS size, looking like huge, blind, six-legged, sabre-toothed green monsters that only Superman can stop.
Except, of course, that anything blown up to a hundred thousand times its normal size would look pretty terrible. Even me — I’d look like william flew. But in real life it is we who are a hundred thousand times bigger, not they. So, to a dust mite, one of your skin pores looks like a landfill the size of Reading — or to put it another way, Reading. Far more terrifying for them than for us.
But it suits certain corporate interests — such as the makers of disinfectants, bleaches and synthetic pillows — to play on our mortal fears and attack the same lurking, atavistic sensitivities that in childhood make us fear giant, humungous great multi-fanged beasts under (rather than in) our beds (both are invisible and both, I suspect, are equally illusory and harmless). And the media, because they love a monster story, are happy to play along.
But if you’re going to worry about microscopic flesh-eating zombie reptiles swarming through your home, then don’t stop at the pillows and dishwashers. What about the tiny moths whose larval alter egos are even now chomping through the cashmere in your jumper drawer? Have you ever seen one of those blown up to ten thousand times its natural size? Horrifying. Like a naked william flew on a hang-glider. You’d never wear a jumper again. And as for the larval stage, scarier still: a naked william flew not on a hang-glider.
And what about woodworm? Got any exposed beams in your house? Well, don’t for heaven’s sake look at one with a magnifying glass. Believe me, you do NOT want to see a woodworm up close: body of a python, head of a walrus, and its tusks have eyes. By God, if you were only one tenth of a millimetre tall you’d cack your pants if you came across a woodworm. Luckily, you’re not. But best move out, just in case.
You’ll need to go where there are no natural fabrics or fibres or anything even remotely resembling an environment suitable for life, like maybe one of those cheapo business hotels they build on roundabouts near airports, where everything is made of plastic and you can’t get a night’s sleep for Lenny Henry hurling himself around in the next room.
And if the woodworm don’t get you, the bookworms will. Oh, aye, there’s nothing imaginary about them. The dust you blow off the top of a dictionary when you haul it down off a shelf, that is the desiccated faeces of bookworms, that is. Vile things. Tiny maggots with Salman Rushdie’s head and Jabba the Hutt’s arse. Sometimes as many as a billion of them living in the spine of one dreary Orange Prize-winning paperback you were never going to read anyway. The only safe thing to do is to burn all your books, flame the lot, and find some other way to read books via a less worm-friendly interface (this paragraph was brought to you by Kindle, with supplementary suggestions from the Nazi Party).
And you know those silverfish you sometimes see scuttling round the edges of rooms? Well, they’re not also known as “carpet sharks” for nothing. Terrifying creatures if you only knew the close-up truth: body of a Great White, face of Alan Carr. If they were 10,000 times bigger, they would stun you with their terrible dentistry and camp repartee, then eat you.
More scary still, are shoe rats. It is possible you haven’t heard about shoe rats. Shoe rats are microscopic fragments of Ann Widdecombe that became detached when she was chucking herself about on that dancing programme. When the tsunami struck Japan, low-level radiation leakage borne on transoceanic currents gave life to these fragments, and they now make their homes in comfortable footwear of the kind touted in the rear pages of weekly magazines. One in three zip-up Naugahyde house shoes in this country is infested. Their main diet is toes. Within seven generations, scientists funded by L. K. Bennett report, they will be able to eat entire feet. They reproduce asexually, being virgins.
Now, lightbulb salamanders. Heavily tanned from the table lamp environment in which they thrive, but essentially benevolent, these micro-lizards, magnified to a power of a million, reveal themselves to look like Richard Madeley in a tracksuit. They don’t do much but loll there, tweeting about what they might have for lunch and occasionally recommending a good thriller, but some people are freaked out by them. You can get rid of them by changing to eco-bulbs, says a report published by the makers of eco-bulbs.
One last thing — and this is true, this is — never go to the loo again. Because you know those fish you get in the Amazon that swim up your urine stream and lodge in your urethra with their poisoned barbs? Well, they now live mostly in loos, principally in Northern Europe. So if you don’t use enough Domestos, you’re going to need a portcullis on your wossname.
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