Trigger Warning: if you don't like disgusting things don't read this.

This morning I was sitting down on the sofa. I'd eaten scrambled egg on sour dough toast. I was drinking tea from a Frida Kahlo mug, a delicious Smoky Russian Caravan, and was watching a clearly rattled Boris Johnson mug and stutter his way through explanations as to why the Tories were fucked. "Passport to Pimlico", one of my favourite Ealing comedies was about to start. God, how smugly middle-class can you be? The self-satisfied smile was so wide the corners of my mouth were meeting round the back of my head. The DUP had a disaster in the local election. Great. There's Charles Hawtrey playing pub piano and looking like Brett from Suede. I'd sent all my e-mails. I'd done all the work I could do for now. I was planning on doing a drawing in the afternoon. A record cover, in fact. Lovely. 

Ten minutes later I was standing in the rain in my driveway staring into a wheelie bin teeming with maggots. At the risk of sounding like Garth Marenghi: maggots? maggots. maggots. maggots. All over the driveway of the house in Stormont. 

Our bins are emptied every two weeks. Unfortunately we'd been away when the last emptying was due, and our brown bin had not been emptied for three weeks. At some point, a fly had taken advantage of the dank, fermenting mulch, because now there were thousands and thousands of maggots, all of them seeking egress. 

I knew I had to deal with this. This was foul, disgusting work, and foul, disgusting work is John work. Susan would be sitting this one out. She is a beautiful lady and I am an unskilled troll, so this was well within my purview. We needed to work out how extensive the plague was. The fetid eco-bags that had been bed and board to these wriggling little shits while we were away, were mercifully few. The maggots, which were teeming about the rim of the bin, as well hurling themselves onto the ground, were just at the extremities. There were a lot at the bottom, climbing the rubbish bags, and a lot of them had made it out. They were on the ground, beneath the bin too, and climbing up our exterior wall, and crawling into the pits and crannies of our roughly tarmacked drive. We started boiling kettles. We found a bucket and some bleach. I found gardening gloves. I put on old shoes and a shirt I didn't mind ruining. And I straight up murdered them. I boiled those fuckers. I bleached them. Again and again. Kettle boiled, bucket hurled, like Tiswas with a body count. "This is what they want?" Unlikely. 

I didn't enjoy it. I don't like killing things. Spiders and moths get a free pass. Daddy Long-legs too. Besides, when I was in hospital I had maggot therapy: some dyed blue, pristine maggots chewed the infection out of my wound. I liked those guys. Those were my maggot pals. But they were specially bred surgical maggots, not these feral, bin-dipping bastards, gorging themselves on fortnight old food-scraps. Am I a maggot racist? Probably. 

I made like Genghis Khan on the pale little shits - it was a scorched maggot policy. It was cruel. They don't half move when the hot bleach is on them. But it had to be done. There were still loads in the bin, and in the now perished eco-bags, full of rotting fish skins and foaming meat, that skulked in the stinking gloop. Removing the still wriggling packages to another bag, I utilised a spade, and they split like the yoke of a poached egg. The stench would melt your face. I was crying. I had to use my hands to pick up this filth and stuff it into another bag. When I had finished, there were still more maggots who'd crawled from the filth of the bin juice, and soon came the cleansing rains, boiled and bleach stinking. The driveway was a mass grave for the larval dead. Like I say, I don't like it and there will probably be some bad karma down the line. Though, frankly, it would be difficult to discern from the normal course of events in my life. 

We got the hose out and cleaned the bin. It still stank. Susan produced some Zoflora disinfectant from the kitchen - fragranced with rhubarb and cassis - and poured that in and hit it with the hose. The smell was like a tramp's nappy, lightly fragranced with rhubarb and cassis. We triple bagged the eco-bags. Three bags for life, plus a refuse sack. And I went off to dump it in a public bin. Again, I'm not proud, but it's another week till our bins are collected. And I needed the filth far away from me. 

Trying to off-load the bag was in itself a fucking saga - which I'm not going to go into here - and took an hour, in the still pissing rain. When I returned Susan had swept up the majority of the corpses and the bin was clean. We were done. We both had baths. Bought a treat of a dinner. And now I'm back on my sofa, watching the Outer Limits and drinking a beer. 

Somewhat less smug than I was this morning. Though Boris Johnson is still looking scared. And the DUP have had their arses handed to them.