A terror to snakes

Enough is enough! I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this plane!” said Neville Flynn, Snakes on a Plane. “Matey, as everyone called Matron, was a terror to snakes,” taken from The Chalet School Series, Elinor M Brent-Dyer.Watching the holy terror of girls towards their Matron in a jolly school-girl series set in Switzerland, or Samuel L Jackson fending off brilliantly coloured snakes with his gun and every cussword known to man, means only one thing: snakes are bad. But Matron, or Samuel Jackson are infinitely worse. A terror to snakes, themselves, in fact. We’ve managed to co-exist peacefully, snakes and I. This was thanks to my parents’ peaceable approach to most living creatures (cockroaches excepted). Their motto has always been: “Leave snakes alone, and they won’t do you any harm.” The first time I saw a snake slither away into our garden, all I did was inform my mother about it – and she nodded sagely.  “That will take care of the rats and frogs, then.” Not that this mild-mannered approach would have worked with the horribly-fanged venomous reptiles of Snakes on a Plane, slithering every which way towards passengers, biting various appendages with gleeful abandon. And it struck me that St Patrick would have struck far more terror in snakes than anyone else.For that’s a famous legend connected to him, one of the most popular patron saints of Ireland, circa the 5th century AD, in whose honour St Patrick’s Day is celebrated. The tale goes that snakes once surrounded the holy man as he was undergoing a particularly rigorous 40-day fast. He waved his stick in anger at them – and every last fanged creature slithered into the ocean, never to be seen again. Till date, Ireland has no snakes, it’s said. “He waved his crozier o’er his head, and lo, each venomed thing took motion, And toads, snakes and vipers fled, In terror to the circling ocean.”Says one enthusiastic poet in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, (December 1858 to May, 1859). Or perhaps what he did was just drive away “the snakes out of the minds of men, snakes of superstition and brutality and cruelty,” as Arthur Brisbane, one of America’s best-known newspaper editors, said. And the phrase, “a terror to snakes,” sort of took hold, with St Patrick becoming the Irish Patron Saint of snake banishers.  Which is bizarre – because Ireland isn’t snakes-less because of St Patrick. Blame the most recent Ice Age for that, according to the National Geographic Magazine, patron-saint of arm-chair travelers. It kept Ireland too cold for reptiles – and when it ended, 10,000 years ago, the surrounding seas still kept snakes away. Guess Samuel L Jackson and his potty mouth are still our best hope, when it comes to being “a terror to snakes.”