Fighting battle against insect invasions
HELP! It’s happened again... I was walking past the door of the spare bedroom and I heard that distinctive, skin-crawling low buzz... flies!
I stealed myself? Stole myself? Whatever! I girded my loins and went in and, sure enough, having aired the room the week before, I’d inadvertently left the window open just a gnat’s crochet and those little blighters were in like Flynn. And as we all know, there’s never just one fly. Flies don’t travel solo, they are pack insects.
Having run out of Kybosh from my last attack, and not being particularly keen on toxic chemicals anyway, there was no only one solution. I put a hat on and draped a net curtain over the top… think Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen…. picked up my comedy BIG hand fly swat – you know, like the ones Kenny Everett used to wave around – and prepared for action!
It was hideous. Those I didn’t get at least went off with a bad headache… as indeed did I. I checked everywhere, pulled out the chest of drawers and nearly gave myself a hernia moving the bed. Gone, or so I thought.
For three days running, every time I went in the bedroom, there they were. How were they getting in? Then I found the mother load clinging on to the back of a picture on the wall. It’s been five days now and hopefully that’s it, although I’m dreading going into the loft.
I guess I’m going to have to go back to hanging those flytraps I’ve had outside all summer. The drawback is that they don’t half whiff and you’re forced to look at a bottle full of semi-comatose flies which you then have to bury in the garden. I have nightmares about Vesuvius-type volcanoes of flies erupting, spilling like molten larvae down our lane.
Still, flies are better than the hornets we had the year before last. Funny, I was never troubled by insects when I lived in the city.
I remember the first year we moved to the country. We woke up one morning to the sound of bleating sheep.
A lot of them, and making a lot more noise than they usually did in the surrounding fields. On looking out of the bedroom window, we discovered a flock merrily traipsing up our courtyard, dropping ‘messages’ along the way.
They were completely flummoxed when they reached a dead end and it took my husband and me quite some time to turn them all around and ‘encourage’ them back to the field from whence they had come!
Then there was the bull affair, when my poor husband came out of his shed one morning only to come face-to-face with the local farm’s pride and joy, a huge pure-bred Hereford. There was a mad race to see who was going to get to the gate that separated them first. The bull or him.
My shouts of Olé were not appreciated, nor were the ‘messages’ the bull left. I wouldn’t put that on my roses, I can tell you.
Then of course there was the live buck rabbit brought through the bedroom window in the early hours of the morning courtesy of my late, much-missed puddy Tigger.
Oh, and the screaming stinking weasel he brought in on another occasion.
Not to mention the dead pheasant he and his brother Eddie brought through the cat flap to gut and gorge on my beautiful Royal blue carpet!
Yes, country life. It might be more healthy for my body but it doesn’t do a lot for my sanity, I can tell you.
For three days running, every time I went in the bedroom, there they were. How were they getting in?