Being dive bombed in the garden by frantic bluebottles is no way to start a summer’s morning
IT’S NOT a form I’m given much to indulging in, so please excuse me while I have a short rant. You too may find the subject touches your own personal rant-radar.
Bluebottles. Bloody hate them. A disgrace to their lovely lyrical name. Every autumn, I forget all about them, and then come summer, they buzz their way back into my consciousness. There is something profoundly and uniquely irritating about the predictably unpredictable drone of the bluebottle in flight. Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Bzzzz.
I’ve had the good fortune never to have known the presence of a foreign body, such as a screwdriver or scalpel, in my head. However, I tend to think being in the same room as a frantic bluebottle in full lawnmower-type throttle is the closest comparison my life experience to date has given me.
The morning routine goes a bit like this. I open the back door to my tiny, but charming, yard and inspect the night’s freshly bloomed crop of sweetpeas. All is peace and scented flowers for roughly five seconds. Then I am dive bombed by bluebottles. I swear they’ve been waiting outside for me to open the door, queuing to get in, swapping positions to see which one gets to be first across the threshold and start driving me crazy.
They then proceed to fly loud, determined and unsteady laps of my cottage in some collective insect marathon. I’ve read about raves that take place in secret locations, the whereabouts of which get texted to people just prior to them happening. Well, it’s as if my house is the permanent designated location for some secret Bluebottle Olympics.
There are two types of circuits these bluebottles make: the lap of the interior of my cottage, and the lap they do of the exterior.
Normal people spend the time before they leave for work in the morning eating breakfast. I spend it jumping up and down, swatting the air, swearing, waving newspapers in a type of semaphore, and opening and closing my front door, which is in a straight line with the back door. That’s part of the lap the bluebottles make of the exterior of the house: they fly out the front door, over the roof, and back in the back door. Honest to God.
They do it in a concerted and knowing attempt to try and prise me from my sanity. Sometimes I run to shut the back door just in time for the circuiting bluebottles to ricochet off the glass like stunned miniature helicopters in their failed attempt to regain access.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Why aren’t birds of paradise, or butterflies, or humming birds flying through my back door in the mornings? Why is it these parasites of the summer, who breed on dead things? And why my door? I’ve done my homework, I know what they like, and there’s nothing of what they like around my house. There is not a scrap of rubbish kept outside in the yard, no dead birds in my chimney, no expired rodents under the floorboards, no rotting meat on the stove, and no Jeffrey Dahmer-type victim heads propped up on the sofa in front of the TV, which was his habitual infamous use of those severed heads.
They’d be waiting a long time to watch TV with me, since there’s no TV in my house either (by the way, while I’m on the subject of Dahmer heads, I did once meet a deeply unsettling Scottish man at a bar in Chengdu, China, who claimed to be a friend of Dahmer’s 17th and final victim, Joseph Bradehoft, but that’s another story). Me, I keep a clean and head-free gaff.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the presence of a bluebottle in a house is like a version of Pythagoras’s Theorem. The one that goes, in any right-angled triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides.
Or I think that’s more or less correct. Writing about bluebottles has had the effect of making me distracted. Do excuse me. I keep having an instinct to start my morning routine of hopping up and down, swatting the air, swearing, etc. Focus! Concentrate! Lights, camera, action!
Back to my Bluebottle Theorem. In any right-minded house, the effect of one bluebottle in the space, whether square or rectangular, is equal to the sound-effect sum of having two drills going off outside my door at intervals, the sanity-effect sum of making me unable to focus on anything other than the task of getting the bluebottle out of the house, and the journalist-effect sum of giving me a subject for the most esoteric rant I’ve ever written.
