I’m staying in a very Christmasy gingerbread house. It is very old and thus, mostly falling to bits. And apart from that it is, in fact, so old that it was constructed in the days when people were apparently a maximum of five feet tall. And even if they weren’t, for some reason (money saving scam, religious hysteria) they made all of their doorways that size. I myself am a gangly six feet, four and a half inches tall… and so everything sharp, wooden and metal- the style of choice four hundred years ago- conveniently hovers at throat height.
Another thing that hovers a lot is the flies in our bedroom. Unseasonally mild weather- no doubt the result of western civilisation being more worried about aerosols and fridges than nature etc.- has somehow or other made it possible for a… what’s the collective noun for a lot of flies?… horde(?) of flies to hatch somewhere in the… wooden bits. Their next course of action seems to have been to come buzzing through a hole in the ceiling above our bed and form a small cloud. Seriously, there were about two hundred of the bastards… fat little bluebottles, all over excited about hatching just before Christmas in a dramatic break with bluebottle tradition.
Flies tend to get everywhere at the best of times, but let’s face it, en masse they’re pretty easily avoided. What with their tendency to mostly hang around shit, and the dead. I don’t know the best way to describe a small cloud of flies. Imagine one fly multiplied a couple of hundred time… the mid-frequency hum created by their semi-synchronised buzzings; the apparently pointless flight paths; the thought of where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing.
Trish’s uncle Onno is here for Chrimbo too, and he’s a biologist. His theory is that there’s a dead bat somewhere on the premises that could be held to account for the sudden pest invasion. But let’s face it, it’s a bat. The sort of creature that you might expect to be in cahoots with flies and maggots in the first place.
Tonight was the second wave of attack and I dealt with it exactly the same way I dealt with the first one last night. I got up on the bed with the vacuum cleaner, took aim and sucked the bastards up. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds. For a start, the architectural reasoning of yore seems to be that all doorways and ceilings should be as low as humanly possible (if not lower) apart from underneath the roof where there should be more than enough room for bats and the like to roost, die and fester whilst remaining conveniently out of reach. And so I had to bounce on the bed in order to suck every last one of the antisocial insects to its Hoover-based death. I wonder what they did in the olde days. Probably ate them.
