A fellow Depp fan recently had to move house in a hurry and ended up in rented accommodation which was none too sparkly. She lives in the US so when she told me that her new place was crawling with some kind of biting insect which flew, buzzed and changed colour (ie, turned red when squished) I was interested to know what they were. She said both she and her cats were getting bitten but the landlady was uninterested in dealing with them, and she (the tenant) was panicking.

I asked her to take pictures but for some reason she wouldn’t do it. Now, wouldn’t you think that if you’re living in a place which is overrun with some kind of insect you’d want to know what it was?

I find insects endlessly fascinating, possibly because my late father was an amateur entomologist and I spent my childhood being dragged around on field trips and watching him mount tiny creatures on only slightly larger pieces of card which he wrote their names on with minute, crabby-yet-readable handwriting - and with a fountain pen, too. If that seems unethical, bear in mind that in my childhood, this was the way it was. If you had an interest in insects, you damn well went out, sucked them up a tube into a killing bottle containing ether and mounted them in display cabinets. But he learned. By the time he retired, he was a volunteer with the county naturalist group and instead of killing things, he captured them, examined them carefully, let them go and went home to write an index card and put a report in.

Anyway, I digress. If I find a strange insect in my house or garden, my natural impulse is to stick a glass over it, and run and get 1) the camera and 2) a handful of books from the reference shelf. For some reason a lot of people run away screaming or smack it with a heavy object. Tut tut… How are you going to learn anything like that?

Take silverfish, for instance. You know, those little silver wiggly things you find in damp places like bathrooms? Often you’ll only see them if you turn the light on in the night because they’re nocturnal and rather shy, bless ‘em. Anyway. Silverfish have survived unchanged since prehistoric times, and very successfully, too! You might spray them with poison and powder them (ditto) and smack them with rolled up newspapers, but you won’t get them all, and they’ll be back - unless you make it Not Damp and seal up any cracks with a filler which doesn’t contain starch, or they’ll just eat that. Oh, and they like to feed on shampoo residues so you’ll need to wipe down the shower EVERY TIME you use it. Ha! Didn’t think you’d like that - neither do I, but then, I don’t mind silverfish in the least.

I rather like woodlice too. And earwigs. And beetles have a special place in my affections, probably because coleoptery was my Dad’s speciality, and I remember particularly the cabinets full of the most gorgeous shiny beetles, each one slightly different from the rest. I suppose those walks with Dad where he’d be constantly picking insects off leaves or the ground to watch them for a few seconds, mutter some incomprehensible latin name and then let them go again gave me a fascination for them, too. As the only girl growing up in a house with two brothers (who naturally loved creepy crawlies) and a father like that, I suppose it was inevitable. And so I let the dinner burn and go and photograph things like the female bush cricket pictured above.

So I don’t poison or exterminate - although I will freely admit that if I had an infestation of something life-threatening I would certainly do so. I also freely admit that I might not be quite so blase about insects and spiders if I lived somewhere that had dangerous or aggressive examples of one or both. Like San Francisco, where my Depp friend is.

OK, point taken, Depp buddy! Squish those colour-changing bugs!

I’d still want to know what they were, though.