Snakes alive!

FOR the vast majority of travellers on budget airlines, the sting in the tail comes when they find they're being charged a ludicrous amount to check in an extra suitcase or munch a tiny tub of Tangy Buffalo Wing Pringles.

Not so for passengers on an easyJet flight from Glasgow to Paris last week. For them, there was a real sting in a real tail courtesy of a scorpion which had either stowed away on board or had embarked in Scotland en route to some unknown destination. Wherever scorpions go on holiday, I suppose. Anyway, a passenger raised the alarm – I'd like to have been a fly on the cabin wall when that happened, though obviously not if scorpions eat flies – and the plane then had to be held in Paris while the creature was captured and removed, and the cabin fumigated with anti-scorpion dust.

Weirdly, that isn't the only “Yikes! What's that doing there?” story to have made the news over the last few days. Clearly something's afoot in the natural world because while a creature that can't fly was terrifying holidaymakers at 30,000 feet, one that can (a bat) was circling a kitchen in County Kerry. Meanwhile, as a man called Derry chased it with a towel, someone else called Tadhg – Derry from Kerry's son, apparently – was filming the whole thing.

Predictably the footage has since gone viral so you can see for yourself. “He's making a mockery of you, boy,” says Tadhg, laughing, as Derry flaps at the bat. Then: “You're tiring him out. He's like McGregor – he's got no legs left,” a topical reference to Dublin boy and Mixed Martial Arts star Conor McGregor, who recently went toe-to-toe with boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr and with about as much success as Derry was having with the bat.

Our final incursion from the natural world to the human one came when a five-year-old boy in Essex encountered the sort of movement nobody wants to see in their toilet bowl – courtesy of a python, which was coiled up there. “He was frantic, and shaking, and I could tell something was wrong, but that was not what I expected,” said the boy's mother. “I had to use a broom handle to lift the lid, then out popped its head and its tongue came out as well.” She added that for a few days previously the family had been wondering why the toilet wasn't draining properly. They didn't ever suspect that a python could be the cause, though. I mean you wouldn't, would you?

Choc horror

THIS is going to come as a shock to anyone who remembers those rinky-dink Pink Panther chocolate bars that helped give us 1970s kids such rotten teeth, but somebody called Barry Callebaut claims to have “invented” pink chocolate and is saying it's the first new chocolate colour since Nestle launched the white chocolate Milky Bar in the 1930s. It's something to do with a newly-discovered type of cocoa bean, apparently, one with a flavour described as being “a tension between berry-fruitiness and luscious smoothness”.

It turns out that Barry Callebaut is a company, not a person, which makes it even more extraordinary that they don't know their chocolate history – don't they remember those yummy, pink, strawberry-flavoured bars, with the oh-so-cool panther on the packet, a cigarette holder cocked insouciantly in his (her?) left hand? Apparently not. Someone should tell them, before they make complete fools of themselves.

D'oh! Here comes trouble ...

WAY, way, way down the list of handy everyday admonitions, you'll find one that says: “Beware what political scenarios you cook up as a joke because, like a snake in a toilet bowl or a scorpion on a plane, even the most far-fetched predictions have a nasty habit of coming back to bite you on the bottom.”

As admonitions go, it isn't snappy, which is why it isn't further up the list. But snappy or not it's a warning the writers of The Simpsons showed a flagrant disregard for on March 19, 2000 when they aired an episode entitled Bart To The Future. In it we flashed forward to 2030 to see Bart as a washed-up rock star and his sister Lisa as President of the United States, picking up the pieces after the disastrous presidency of her predecessor: Donald Trump. People like to think you couldn't make President Trump up, but two decades ago The Simpsons writers really did.

To date, EU-hating, abortion-loathing, gay marriage-despising Old Etonian MP Jacob Rees Mogg hasn't featured in the show as a future British Prime Minister, and long may that oversight continue. It's bad enough that bampots on this side of the Atlantic believe he could perform that role without The Simpsons tempting fate, a la President Trump.

And yes, you did read that correctly: some people think Rees Mogg would make a spiffing PM. Some of them are readers of the Conservative Home website who, when surveyed on the question, have an alarming tendency to propose him for No 10. Another booster is fresh-faced right-wing journalist Tim Stanley of The Telegraph. “Jacob Rees Mogg would make a fine Prime Minister,” he wrote last week, tongue nowhere near cheek. So just as Jeremy Corbyn had Momentum helping him take over the Labour Party from the back benches, so does J-ReMo have something similar. Call it Moggmentum if you like. There's even a website, Ready For Mogg, where you can pledge your support.

I've signed it, and became the 25,852nd person to do so. Mind you, I gave my name as Lisa Simpson.

Clown warfare

IT'S true that snakes in toilets, bats in kitchens and Rees Moggs in Downing Street are all horrifying propositions, but they're nothing compared to the terror that clowns can instil in otherwise rational humans. Coulrophobia is the name given to fear of them and sufferers will have a torrid time over the next few weeks as It, a new film version of Stephen King's 1986 novel, works its way though the multiplexes. It features a scary clown called Pennywise, who lurks in the sewers of a fictional American town – called Derry, funnily enough. But mindful of a spate of real-life incidents in 2016 in which real people dressed up as clowns and committed acts of violence, police in Pennsylvania are urging anyone who sees a scary clown to call its dedicated, toll-free Terrorism Tip Line. There's also an app which allows coulrophobes to photograph said clowns and have the image sent straight to the state's Criminal Intelligence Centre. The moral of the story? If you're planning a trip to the flicks to see It, don't go dressed as a clown.