Iwas sitting on a toilet bowl trying to evacuate my bowels in the bathroom when I was startled by the sight of a tiny brownish object slowly inching its way across the wet floor. Instinctively I retracted my legs a bit because I didn't want the thing to crawl up my lower limbs.
The slimy object of my fascination was a 5 cm long millipede. The bug was crawling on the floor at the junction of the floor tiles and the tiled wall in the bath room.
I noted that the millipede was crawling and stopping intermittently and turning its head left and right and top and bottom as if looking for direction with its two antennae. To my relief it made no attempt to move towards the direction of the toilet bowl where I was sitting.
My wife would have freaked out if I had mentioned there was a creepy and slimy bug in the bathroom. I would imagine that the next thing she would do would be to squash the bug with a piece of toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet bowl. No, I would not tell any body about my find. I would rather honour the right of the little fellow's existence rather than to send him to bug heaven.
After finishing my business I returned to the toilet with a plastic box to look for the millipede, half hoping that it would have crawled out of the bathroom. I found it lurking behind the bathroom broom. After gently drawing him out from the sanctuary of the plastic broom with a gentle sweeping motion of the plastic lid I coaxed it to enter the box compartment.
Once inside I closed the box with the lid and headed straight to the drying yard, which is overlooking the back lane at the back of the house. Extending my hand into the air space through the metal grills I turned the box upside down and opened the lid. With a gentle tap on the box the millipede slipped off the box and descended into the air down to the back lane below.
Goodbye Mr Bug and have a safe journey. It was all I could do for you to save you from a quick extinction of being squashed into a pulp and flushed down into the toilet bowl.
