A cursory glance at your common or garden tortoise perhaps doesn't invoke the sort of panic one might experience when face to face with a great white shark, but appearances can be deceptive.
Millions of years ago, when these apparently peaceful creatures first slipped out of our back gardens and headed for the waterways it wasn't just their flippers that began to evolve. Once they reached the sanctity of salt water they became really nasty bastards too. Which goes some way to explain how my mate had his chest muscle bitten off by one whilst scuba diving.
I digress. I don't actually know what bit me. It was whilst delivering newspapers, aged fifteen. I got home and had the mother of all pus-filled lumps on my calf.
Squeezing pus-filled spots was basically a vocation when I was fifteen (not the only activity that fell into this category, but I will say no more lest my mother be reading) so I set to work on this biggest, juiciest beauty I'd ever laid eyes on.
It was so big I struggled to apply sufficient pressure, but eventually it happened - a tidal wave of whitish gloop that landed on my hair, even on my curtains.
Not painful, not horrific, but it's my only bite-related anecdote and I really didn't want to feel left out.
