When I came downstairs yesterday morning Kyria ran up to me and said “Dad! Dad! Come and see Ant City!” In response to the number – a handful or two – of ants scurrying around on the living room floor, she and Ian had built an entire block city to retrain them as humans. They had provided a barracks to live in, a school, a playground, even a football pitch.

In a more sinister vein, they had also filled the bathroom sink with water and floated in it a toy ship with a flat wooden block laid sideways across it; this served as a gangplank, which recalcitrant ants were forced to walk. Several ant corpses floated in the water. I pointed out to them that this wasn’t fair to the ants, as ants can’t swim.

“Yes they can,” countered Ian.

“Well these seemed to have drowned, don’t they?”

“But they swam for a while first, then they drowned!”

It took some doing to talk them out of capital punishment as an appropriate means for disciplining the ants; after all, the little rogues were constantly trying to escape.

“Don’t they like your city?” I asked.

“No,” said Kyria mournfully.

“Where do they go when they escape?”

“Well they try to go back to, what’s that thing called, where they came from?”

“An ant colony!” shouted Ian.

Well, I guess, ants will be ants…