A bee down the trousers

This morning I was being chased around the church yard by an active 2-year old called Jacob. We were admiring flowers, naming the colours, picking daisies, and playing hide-and-seek.

The toddler’s service was about to start as one mum, a hospital doctor, arrived with her son. As the mums chatted, I retreated to a safe distance to retrieve something prickly from inside my trousers, around the pocket area. It felt like one of those things that stick to your socks. A prickly ball.

So, hand down side of trousers, I got my fingers round the offending uncomfortable article and pulled it out. The mums were alerted to the bee that managed to sting me twice by a shout of surprise and pain. I shook my hand involuntarily, and the bee fell to the ground. Dead but twitching.

Having a doctor in the midst is a great comfort. Especially a doctor of the sympathetic kind. Kind and sympathetic.

Mind you, had anyone entered the church at the point I was sitting on a pew, trousers loose, looking at the red mark on my left thigh and ouching at my middle finger, they might have wondered what sort of service the Singalong for Toddlers was.

Some advice is welcome. Doctor G went in search of bicarbonate of soda. None found in the church kitchen. Equally impressive was the first aid kit that was pulled out of a double baby buggy, complete. Germolene. Very soothing.

Then Doctor G emerged from the kitchen, and issued the stern command “Pee on your finger.”

I thought, well I suppose I could, but how to pee on my thigh? I declined.

Dr G opined “The English are such wimps.” As if Germans and French were much more ready to pee on themselves than the British. I do know the French are more prepared to use suppositories – I was given one in Normandy on a school exchange at the age of 12, and not having a clue what to do with it, I flushed it down the toilet.

But I digress.

Wimp I might be, but songs, prayers, coffee and home made biscuits do wonders for healing.

“Just think,” said Dr G as she said farewell, “you might have gone into Anaphylactic shock – and I have no adrenaline on me, so you might have died before the paramedics made it to Cheddington.”

She smiled that way all doctors smile, when they cheer you up by telling you all the awful things that could have happened but didn’t. I remember a surgeon called Mr Christmas who did the same. Cheery soul.

“Oh, and maybe you have a bee’s nest in your bedroom” she added breezily as she set off down the church path. “How else could a bee have got down there?”

Nice.

“Of course it could have been worse” was her final statement. “Just think how close it came to sting you on…”

Oh the joys of a vicar’s life in the country.