It's Just Not Cricket

We are in the middle of a cricket epidemic. I don’t know whether other houses in Karratha are facing the same crisis, or if they just particularly like our house, but it’s beginning to get irritating. At first the little critters were a source of amusement. In the evening, when we are lounging on the sofa after dinner, we will hear a thud. Followed by another a few minutes later, and another, and another. Occasionally we will actually be looking at the window when these thuds occur and will be witness to giant crickets face-planting the glass. They appear to be drawn to the light, not realising of course that there is a double-glazed window in between them and the Holy Grail of light. They just launch themselves into the windows and then bounce off them. As I said, at first it was funny, but after crickets crash into you windows night after night after night, they begin to make a bit of a mess. Cricket smears have started to appear most noticeably on the patio doors – I’m not sure what part of themselves they’re leaving behind but it’s sort of green and smeary. Not nice.


The worst (and perhaps most strange) of all is the baby crickets in our bath. Sadly, they are not jumping about all over the place and having a jolly good time; they are all dead, every single one of them. We keep the plug in the bath (you never know what might come crawling up the drains out here) so it is a mystery as to where they are coming from. There are whole crickets, pieces of crickets (wings, legs) and little black dots which I can only assume are baby cricket poos. It is very strange and very, very gross. We clean the bath and the next day at least a couple more crickets and body parts litter it again. I don’t know how they’re getting into the bath, I don’t know why they are all dead, I don’t know why some are whole and some are in bits. It’s carnage. Perhaps it is a mystery that will never be solved…