Writing Inspired by Worms!

We recently had a crisis in our household. Well, I think we had a small problem but my wife assures me it is a crisis. In a moving round of some furniture we discovered a collection of little holes, and a pile of fine sawdust on one of the back support sections of our settee. It looked like woodworm we decided.

But what exactly is woodworm and what do you do about it? Well it was time to turn to the Internet and discover what the problem was. Wikipedia is always a good source of information on any subject so that is where I started. I very quickly established that there is more than one type of woodworm. Did we have Ambrosia beetles, or Common Furniture beetles, or Powder Post beetles or what?

Before I realized what was happening, I had forgotten the original problem and was merrily surfing the Net in order to improve my knowledge on all these little arthropods and their ability to consume my furniture. The level of detailed information was all quite fascinating and much more interesting that the plight of our settee.

Bookworms, I discovered, were actually not a specific breed of creature but a popular generalization for any insect which supposedly bores through books. These include silverfish and cockroaches. Our settee was actually in the room we very grandly call the library! As the name suggests this room is full of books. Now my interest was really taken up. I was not overly concerned about one settee, but if all our books are at risk of being on some bugs’ Michelin Food Guide to our library then I was all for some kind of remedial action.

The trouble is that these little blighters are only about one millimeter in length, and you only know you have them when they leave the holes they make and become bugs which fly away! Reading little phrases like “the adults do not feed; they just reproduce” didn’t fill me with confidence at all.

Anyway, it got me thinking about stories I could write which involved all this newly gleaned information I now had about woodworm. This writing could be fiction, science fiction or maybe a factual piece about the stresses of discovering these little holes. There was a slim chance I would be inspired to write poetry about my woes. I’ve already got a blog piece out of it all!