You might not be able to tell from my photograph, but I am extremely attractive to females. More specifically, the blood-sucking females of the genus Culicidae.
I’d rather be attractive to humans, to be honest, but at my age you have to take what you can get.
A study led by the London School of Tropical Medicine has confirmed what some of us have known all our lives: mosquitos are picky eaters. A series of experiments on identical and non-identical twins has shown that the insects are drawn to certain people by their body odour, and that this is largely dictated by genetics. Some of us are simply born delicious.
This is what I have been telling my friends for years — as I cower in the corner of a Greek hotel room at two in the morning, swatting the air around my head and squealing: “It’s coming for me! I can hear it!”
This is what I tell my husband when, on the rare occasions we go abroad, he proposes a sunset cocktail. “It’s alright for you!” I wail self-pityingly before spraying myself from top to toe in industrial-strength DEET, slamming shut all the doors and windows, jumping into bed and pulling the sheets over my head. “You don’t know what it’s like to be born delicious.”
It isn’t just mosquitoes. All my life, the entire insect world has been after my blood. Fleas, midges, horseflies, nits. In summer, a black cloud of biting creatures hovers permanently around my head, like a cartoon of a bad mood.
The first time my family went on a foreign holiday, I was 15. We went to Belgium, for heaven’s sake — hardly a tropical swampland. Yet on our first night there, a resourceful mosquito somehow tunnelled its way into my shuttered bedroom and feasted upon my face. In the morning, I woke up to find that I couldn’t open my eyes. My face was a swollen mass of suppurating bites. For the rest of that seminal family holiday I trailed miserably round Belgium, flinching every time someone stared at my septic head.
I couldn’t have looked more like a medieval plague victim if I’d had a sorrowful monk walking ahead of me ringing a bell. I have noticed — here’s a tip-off for the scientists — that people who get bitten a lot tend to be physically delicate in all sorts of other ways. It’s as though we are literally thin-skinned, so that anything from a flea bite to the wrong washing powder can bring us out in carbuncles. As a child I was so allergic to cow parsley that every time we attempted a country walk, the jelly-like covering on my eyeballs would swell up until it bulged out of my eye sockets. Even now, if I expose so much as a dainty ankle to the sun, my whole body flares up with heat rash.
And then there are others, like my husband, whose skins seem to be made of a denser material. They go brown in the sun, instead of spotty. They can lie on a lawn and fall asleep, instead of writhing about with itchy legs. No mosquito dares come near them, for fear of bruising her tender proboscis on such a leathery hide.
In the 11 years I have known him, my husband has never had an insect bite. When we had a flea infestation in our sitting room, you could actually see them hopping over him to get to me. Every time the children bring home nits, the critters march in single file straight onto my head — never onto his. It’s hard, when you’re itching from your scalp to your toes, not to feel a little hard done by. I look at my smooth, unblemished husband and wish I could have been born just a little less delicious.
The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
