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The day did not start well. Dreaming blissfully in my bed, I was brought to a bone-shaking consciousness by the sound of someone screaming my name. The word which followed did little to calm my spirit.

"SCORPION!"
I remember thinking at the time this was no way to greet the morning, then turned my head to see the familiar arching shape of a scorpion tail next to my foot. Just before the pain started, I remember squashing it between a copy of Speak Better Indonesian and William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach. Alas, it was too late. The damage had already been done.

Scorpion stings are strange things. One minute you are lying asleep all cosy under the covers and the next you are jumping around the house like a one-legged grasshopper - a very profane, foul-mouthed, one-legged grasshopper.

At first you are not entirely sure what's going on, what with the blinding flashes of pain, the shooting stars and the intensive adrenal injection, but then you reach a kind of deserted plateau on which you see your destiny spread out before you with a clearness previously unknown mankind. You are going to die, you think to yourself. You have just been stung by a scorpion.

Some people maintain that the only way to cure the pain caused by such a sting is to lift the bonnet on your car, grab a good handful of spark plug leads and get a close friend to start the engine. The motor has to be running of course - the electric shock is said to realign the synapses and ban the pain from the mind. In Bali, where cars are not always readily to hand, the accepted form in such situations is to feed the unfortunate victim with a kind of homeopathic cocktail. First, an old women fills a large jar with 17 difference varieties of species, then adds a gallon or two of arak, this island's clear but powerful hooch, then finally she tosses in a healthy handful of centipedes, vipers and yes, scorpions. Then you are expected to drink it.

It was of course my fate this particular morning to be taken to the house of said old woman, carried aloft on the shoulders of Balinese friends like a victorious captain. I failed to see this analogy at the time, however - as I screamed in agony atop my human bier one of those beneath me said:" Don't worry. I am sure you will walk again." Sure enough, when we finally reached her house, the toothless old dear held in her gnarled and crinkled fingers a foul-smelling potion that appeared the colour of blood with the odour of a durian bathed in kerosene

"I think I'm going to die," I whispered.

"Shut your face and drink up," she said. I was just about to down the whole lot when she stunned me with a peculiar question.

"Did you bring the scorpion?" she asked. "The one that stung you?"

It hadn't occurred to anyone at the time of course, but apparently a necessary part of the cure involves the ritual consumption of the offending creature's vile body. This, I thought to myself, was taking homeopathy a little too far. "I'm fine now," I murmured through gritted teeth. "Fit as a fiddle. Look." With that I stood up, made my excuses and left the crowd arguing the semantics of shamanism. Sod this for a game of bridge I thought - I'll have an aspirin instead.

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