John went off to Singapore this morning at 4am. He never hears his alarm clock so I have to smack him around the head a few times with a pillow to get him to stir and then a few more times to turn it off, by which point I’m thoroughly awake.

So I spent a couple of hours reading in bed before Alula jumped on me demanding her weetbix (Australian brand – don’t have a go at me about my spelling) and my help in colour-co-ordinating her knickers for the day.

I wandered out onto the balcony and almost stepped directly into the pile of bat poo dropped there by the child-sized fruit bat which hangs out nightly upside down from the roof beam.

Groaning at the ickness of that I staggered blurry eyed into the study and almost stepped on a District 9 sized cockroach. It was belly up, it’s spiky tufted legs immobile. Sighing because John wasn’t there to call on for cockroach duty I manned up and grabbed a wine glass still with the ashy dregs of Bali’s finest coating the bottom. Using that and a dirty tissue I bent down to sweep said cockroach into the glass. Turns out that cockroach was very much ALIVE. It was just resting down there on the floor, belly up, maybe it was some kind of cockroach joke, his mates laughing from behind the bin. Scare the crap out of the human, go on, it’ll be funny. Once I zoomed in on it with the tissue it burst into activity, its antannae things waving drunkenly. I swear to God I screamed the entire village down.  And yet I still managed, while screaming, to lurch toward the balcony and toss the thing across the roof. I did think for an instant of flushing it down the loo but I weighed up in a nanosecond whether I had the nerve to make it that far and decided not to risk it.

The day turned out to be one of those days where you meet people on the street and they say ‘man, I wish mercury would hurry the hell up and unretrograde’ and you nod and say ‘totally!’ Because this is Ubud and that’s the UK equivalent of saying ‘alright?’ ‘Yeah, not bad.’ But after paying 300 quid to Qatar fucking airways (that’s what they should rebrand as) for a cancellation fee (long story) I was the one screaming at Mercury to unretrograde its ass double-quick.

Then I had to spend the entire day, when not stuck in traffic on Raya Ubud (mercury again) contemplating mowing down the Japanese tourists who cause the traffic jams with their mega buses, writing copy about San Diego which made me sad and frustrated because I really, really want to go to Comic Con one day (with half-naked actors at my side pretending to be Alex & Jack) and this dream seems to be eluding me (mercury again?)

Finally, I get home and discover that the bat shit is now cemented to the floor, three days of washing up sits forlornly in the sink, we’ve run out of bowls (I know this is lame but really I’m busy trying to earn a living…and battling my way through traffic and um, going out for long, boozy lunches)…and oh SHIT, I step closer to the floor cushion in the bedroom. It appears that it’s moving. I blink and focus in on the half-eaten chicken carcass that Lily, our dog, has carried in and feasted on. She has left it here and it is now literally being carried off by an army of 3 million ants. The pillow, once white, is now black and pulsating like some optical illusion. Screaming I pick up the chicken carcass between thumb and forefinger and run to the balcony, hurling it like it’s a grenade into the bushes below. Too late, several hundred of the tiny things swarm up my arm in a scene taken straight from Indiana Jones. I slap them away (screaming) and return to the cushion which is now the scene of pure ant anarchy.

3 million ants (minus the ones that got hurled with the cushion) are running this way and that in utter panic. Their chicken feast has vanished, what will come next? Earthquake? Fire? No…Flood! I fill a bucket with water, throw the pillow onto the roof and douse it with water. Ants are however stubborn little things. They cling to the cushion through several dousings until in the end, the cushion goes the way of the chicken, tossed into the garden below. Only after I throw it do I think to shout a warning in case anyone is walking below.

Anyway, that was my day. How was yours?