Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

The night as ever was bloody hot and in the words of Dylan Thomas ‘bible black’ when a large female praying mantis blew in on the breeze through the open window of my ‘study’. It landed on my desk between the wine glass, the laptop and the little statue of Santa Rita, patron saint of impossible causes.

I had been thinking that I had not seen a praying mantis this year and wished that I could. Now, by chance or destiny – or perhaps thanks to God Almighty himself – here was one on my desk: the colour of bronze, her long sleek body perhaps three inches long, with beady black eyes and a triangular sci-fi head from which protruded two long whisker-like horns.

She had two front claws that made her look as if she were praying but which were in fact lethal weapons.

Like the girl from Ipanema, she sashayed samba-style towards my left hand which lay on the laptop, her long horns trembling, as if she wanted to ask me to dance. But then she became distracted.

A fly had landed on the desk and, as if compelled by a magnetic force, moved ever closer to the mantis which, when the fly was about one inch away, pounced with mouth and claws. Within a couple of minutes, the mantis had completely devoured the fly.

Whenever I myself try to kill flies, I pick up the fly swat and they all disappear. Then when I put it back down, they all come back.

As you probably know, during sex, the female praying mantis devours the male who is much smaller. To begin with, as they make the beast with two backs, she eats his head. But somehow, headless, he is able to continue, regardless, for up to 24 hours.

The deed done, she eats the rest of him.

The reason she eats him, according to the science, is to provide food for their offspring. But I am not convinced that this tells the whole story. I think she gets a kick out of it.

The sexual cannibalism of the female praying mantis, scientists will insist, tells us nothing about ‘human women’ as I have seen them described in such discussions.

I don’t agree.

I’m not saying a woman has ever wanted to devour me in a literal sense but one or two have definitely wanted to kill me.

One once sank the nails of both her hands into my face and dragged them down with surgical precision.

Germaine Greer famously wrote in her 1970 feminist handbook, The Female Eunuch: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’

But surely, women hate men just as much. Justifiably, justifiably. No doubt.

In the words of that classic ballad from the American deep south ‘Frankie and Johnny’ about a woman who kills her man: ‘Lord, he was my man, and he done me wrong.’

But thinking about it more, the female praying mantis is a metaphor for male fear rather than male hatred – though the two are closely entwined: the fear men have of rejection and ridicule, their fear of sexual failure, and their fear, as my lovely stepmother used to say, that ‘soon women won’t need men’.

Salomé, the ultimate femme fatale, is often seen as the personification of such fear. In Against Nature, J.K. Huysmans wrote that in fin de siècle French symbolist Gustave Moreau’s painting of her she was no longer merely a sexually alluring dancer with ‘quivering bosom and tossing thighs’. She had become ‘the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles – a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning’.

As I’ve said before, it is strange how seemingly separate events elide to create a pattern whose significance remains elusive.

The next day, my middle son Giovanni-Maria, 14, came home from the beach with a baby bird. Cycling along the tracks through the fields he found it entangled in brambles.

It looks like some kind of chicken or perhaps a partridge or pheasant. We have nine chickens and I hope it is a cockerel which we lack despite the racket they make as we males need all the help we can get.

Giovanni-Maria keeps it in a portable cat cage in his room next to my ‘study’. It is certainly very vocal.

Then I read that marine biologists have released the first 130,000 baby octopuses of a projected batch of half a million into the sea        just down the coast from us at Cesenatico and Riccione to combat the granchio blu, aka the Atlantic blue crab.

I’m not saying a woman has wanted to devour me in a literal sense but one or two have definitely wanted to kill me

This vicious fast breeder foreign crab came across in the ballasts of ships from North America many years ago but its numbers have grown exponentially in the past decade. It is playing havoc with the indigenous fauna. It is destroying the clam and mussel farms in our neck of the woods but is so resilient that it has also invaded the area’s rivers and been found in the River Po 100 miles from the sea. Females produce up to 1.5 million eggs.

Giovanni-Maria and my youngest son Giuseppe, 11, often fish for them at the mouth of the river a mile away from our house using a chicken leg for bait. They catch about 30 each time and they are very tasty.

An octopus can eat up to four a day.

I hope that these octopuses, like the wolves that live in the pine forest by the sea, also develop an appetite for the highly-trained nudists who have stolen the best bit of our beautiful beach.

As for my female praying mantis, she has moved to my straw hat which I keep on the chair alongside my desk. No doubt she thinks this is a good place to be as sooner rather than later I will put it on my head.