My younger brother Henry called me from Australia this morning (two of my lovely brothers live in Brisbane). The conversation went something like this…

“I made a nice egg jaffle for myself a little while ago,” began Henbone (that’s his family nickname).

“Umm… Sounds good. So you still have your jaffle irons?”

“Don’t you?” Hen was surprised.

“No, we just have a sandwich-maker but we never use it because I’m always on a diet…”

“Never mind,” Hen said sympathetically, “but let me tell you what happened. I had made this delicious-looking jaffle – it was all golden brown, crisp and done to perfection, if I do say so myself (Henry lives on his own as present) – and I had made a steaming hot cup of tea to have with it; both the tea and the jaffle were on the dining room table, and I was just about to begin my meal when I noticed that the kitchen tap was dripping. In the few moments it took for me to walk over to the tap and turn it off something most peculiar happened…”

“A cat had come in and started to eat your jaffle?”

“No,” Henry laughed, “that would have been preferable.”

“A dog?”

“No,” he derided, “nothing nearly as nice as a dog or cat.”

“A gecko or a possom?” my mind raced to other creatures. (Surely a nasty snake would not want to snaffle an egg jaffle!)

“Well,” Henry continued (seeing that I couldn’t possibly guess), “you know those flying cockroaches can get extremely big? This one was the biggest cockroach/beetle type of insect I have ever seen – nearly as big as the circumference of my cup – and there it was… It looked as though a bomb had hit the table. Tea everywhere, all over the table and even over my jaffle! As soon as my back was turned the giant cockroach had obviously kamikazed, from a great height, and with great force, straight into my cup of tea.”

“He was dead then?”

“If the impact hadn’t killed him the scalding hot tea would have finished him off, he was floating on the remaining two-thirds of tea in the cup,” my brother confirmed.

“You didn’t feel like giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation?” I alluded to the time that Henry had brought a drowned child back to life.

“Not this time Sally, I threw his big ugly body out onto the garden.”

“And did you eat your jaffle?”

“No, it was sodden and unappetizing, besides, I was put off. But I made another cup of tea – I was still dying for one.”

Here are some photographs of kamikaze-style cockroaches and others – with thanks to the cockroach lovers who took the original photos.