No doubt I'm tempting fate, but so far – weather-wise – this has been a perfect summer: a bit of sun, plenty of cloud-cover, a few thunderstorms, a fair bit of rain and, above all, fair –to-middling temperatures. If anything, they've had it hotter in England. My sister tells me that the recent torrential rain has turned the grass in her garden back to green. It's not easy being green here at this time of year, but this year green is very much the prevailing colour.
What they don't have in England, particularly in the town, are the insects. The teeming hundreds and thousands of them. While a lethal combination of intensive agriculture, insecticides, 5G and other human activity is busy killing them off all over the rest of the world, here there are bees and butterflies in abundance. Perhaps there are fewer than there might have been, say, 20 years ago, but every time I walk past the lavender bushes at the front of the house, the air is loud with the sound of bumble bees, multi-coloured butterflies and hummingbird moths all busy with their daily activity.
How perfect it would all be if that were all. Alas, there are flies. Just as a cricket ball tends to swing more under cloud cover, it seems that the threat of rain and particularly thunder brings out the flies in their multitudes. They mass on the glass windows and doors, they swarm in the kitchen and they upset my delicate mental balance. The big ones are bad – once they get into the house, they fly around the place, crashing into windows and walls as they look for a way to get out again, yet when I open a door for them they head in the opposite direction, back into the house to fly around noisily like the model airplanes down at the aeronautical club in the meadow directly below us.
The small ones are worse, though. Far worse. The silent enemy that doesn't even attempt to get back outside. They fly around your head and land on you when you're attempting to concentrate on any activity – such as some supposedly relaxing yoga to redress your mental equilibrium – and every futile attempt to brush them away only increases their determination to land on you. I hate it, just as I hated being tickled as a child, so maybe it's a throwback to those days. When I used to go to evening yoga classes BC, before COVID, our teacher would tell us just to let it go and welcome their visits. What woolly and idealistic nonsense.
I've tried everything. I've even tried some readers' tips from the Daily Express, which somehow found their way onto my liberal phone. With hope in my heart, I tried dissolving some common soap in a dish of white vinegar. Not a single fly investigated it. Not a single fly was drugged by the heady mixture and rendered too heavy to fly. I even resorted to the vacuum cleaner when I found them massing on the underside of the extraction hood. My disgust trumped my usual frugality when it comes to unnecessary use of heavy-duty electricity.
So it's been back to the trusty two-pronged assault of fly paper and fly-swat. The former is as disgusting to try to secure to the ceiling with a drawing pin as it is once it becomes a popular port-of-call for inquisitive flies. Not to mention the business of taking it down and disposing of it in the bin without getting glue or dead flies on your skin.
The fly-swat turns me into a raving, raging psychopath. My rampages are generally accompanied by the kind of foul and abusive language that would get me sent off a football pitch – although I've come to try to adopt more the Good Wife's German 'verdannpten fliegen', which means approximately 'bloody flies'. The basic plastic swat from Intermarché is now so patched with grey gaffer-tape that it's almost unrecognisable. Being a thoughtful psycho-killer, I don't like to chuck away plastic that probably can't be re-cycled if I can positively help it. The grey gaffer-tape has the advantage that the whacked fly sticks to the implement long enough for me to dispose of it in the bin. It also gives the weapon a little more heft. But the time is rapidly approaching when I am going to have to trade it in for a new one.
And then there are the mosquitoes. For some reason, there are many more of them at the front of the house than there are behind it. Being conscious of how much water is wasted every time you flush a loo, I like to use the ample facilities of mother nature in the summer. But it's a hazardous business thanks to the mozzies that proliferate around my favourite watering holes.
Generally speaking, a quick one and back inside and you can elude attack. Should I stop for a bit of weeding, however – which I do from time to time when the need to do something useful (even if futile) becomes overpowering – I'm quickly bitten to buggery. The speed with which they bite and suck is astonishing. I try to ensure that they pay the ultimate price for such temerity, but the little swine are even smaller and nippier than the common housefly.
Of course, I could resort to the back balcony. Half- or fully-cut with whiskey, William Faulkner would piss from his balcony at or onto visiting strangers, but discretion is my middle name. To be a real writer, you have to live in extremis or a semi-permanent state of inebriation.
Worst of all is being trapped in a bedroom with even a lone mosquito. That appalling high-pitched whine somewhere near your head as you sink into the pillow tells you that you're in for a night of it. My skin must be particularly tasty to the blood-suckers. When I'm around, they leave the Good Wife in peace. She is troubled by the moon and the concerns of her clients, while I tend to wake up only when the call of nature or the need to scratch a mosquito bite becomes too strong to ignore. They always go for my knuckles, where the most intense itching on earth seems to occur. It calms down after about half an hour, but by then I'm in such a state of agitation that getting back to sleep becomes fraught – usually demanding an extended case of fictional cricket teams. Eventually, the mental exercise tends to bore me back to sleep.
So every night I scan the walls and ceiling of our bedroom armed with my taped-up fly-swat. If you're lucky, you can catch them off their guard, dozing as they wait for the lamp to go off and the nocturnal blood bath to begin. So why not get a mosquito net and drape it around the bed, you may ask? Two reasons: one is that you get tangled up in the thing when you get up to answer nature's call; two is that said entanglements can tear the net – and if there's one thing worse than a mosquito in your bedroom, it's a mosquito in your comfort zone.
That said, you're probably right. It's time to buy a new mosquito net and a brand-spanking-new fly-swat. Neither, though, will stay spanking-new for long.
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