Please, if you read and enjoy this vivid metaphor, do me the favour of using it at least once so we can see if it can enter mainstream usage.  It could give a rest to the slightly worn ‘I need that like I need a hole in the head’.  You’d get more attention to your needs if you said, ‘I need that like Achilles needs snot on his spearpole…’

See also the bestellar reviews, complete with rich quote-mosaics, of Adam Nicolson’s magnificent Why Homer Matters and Logue’s War Music, a muscular rendition of several books of the Iliad. 

‘… as he needs us

No more than our Achilles needs

Snot on his spearpole – we are free to go.’

Source: Christopher Logue, War Music: An account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 68