I remember being concerned as my 65th birthday approached, because I had never actually thought of retirement except as being anything other than the time when one started drawing pensions instead of paying them and so, although my head told me nothing would change, my heart wasn’t sure. Maybe my mind remembered that my father died at 65, and so I was relieved when the day was over and life continued as before. However, life can never really be the same because every day is different and can be summed up by the truism, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
I like those sayings which remind us to make each day count for something, and as summer arrives one of the things I must do is to prepare for the annual invasion of flies. These pesky creatures make summer a misery for animals and humans alike, and so my first action has been to put up the fly screen on the back door. Despite this, by the time we remove the screen in late autumn, the kitchen walls will be spotted with the blood of victims thus providing forensic evidence of my wife’s skill with a rolled-up Daily Telegraph.
Next on the list will be to spray the sheep with Vetrazin or Clik to deter the greenbottle, (lucilia sericata) or other flies from laying their eggs in dirty damp wool. Should this happen and not be treated, the resultant maggots will eat the animal alive.
My battle against flies however, does not end with door screens, assault by newspaper and Vetrazin; it can also take the form of an old fashioned solution. A few years ago, despite wifely protestations, I purchased a job-lot of sticky fly paper from a stall in Abergavenny market. This was the prelude to a cunning plan which involved untwisting the gluey strip out of its little box and attaching it to the kitchen ceiling by a drawing pin. The theory being that flies land on the paper and become stuck.
In practice however, the tacky paper tears as you unravel it so that your fingers leave marks on the wall and you become stuck to the chair you are standing on. Then the paper loop breaks and the sticky mess falls onto the woollen rug. Finally, you run out of drawing pins because they have all bent over as you try to push them in. However, what finally caused me to give up on sticky paper was when I found that those in the polytunnel wrapped themselves around my head, and in any case, had trapped only four flies, three moths and a daddy-long-legs during the whole season.
So merciless are gnats, midges and mosquitoes in their pursuit of human blood that I think I must have offended some malevolent fly god in a previous incarnation. It does not matter what I wear because their proboscis will penetrate armour plated Kevlar. My only relief is from about two pints of Avon ‘Skin so soft’ smeared on after a shower. Woe betides me however, if I leave even one square inch of flesh untreated.
My battle with flies seems to get more ferocious every year and I am constantly searching for new weapons to defeat this ubiquitous enemy. Recently I have raised the stakes by using devices called ‘Red Tops.’ This involves pouring a sachet of a special South African powder into a clear plastic bag and adding a litre of warm water. A red cap is then placed on the bag prior to it being hung in a sunny spot around the buildings. I aught, at this point, to say that it is wise not to place the bag up-wind of where you are likely to work as the stink is noxiously evil to the human nose but devastatingly seductive to flies.
Each bag will attract about five to six thousand flies which enter and cannot then get out. If you are of a disposition that can stand the sight (and smell) of a squashy, seething maelstrom of dead and dying flies then I recommend the use of Red Tops.
I would not want readers to think I have dedicated the remainder of my life to ridding the world of flies. This is too narrow an objective for ones mental health which is probably best served by keeping the mind open to lots of ideas; in just the same way as physical health can best be served by titillating the stomach with a variety of foods. This latter point being illustrated by the following salutary tale reported in a US newspaper about a tough old cowboy from Wisconsin
He had counseled his grandson, that if he wanted to live a long life, the secret was to sprinkle a pinch of gun powder onto his porridge every morning. The grandson did this religiously to the age of one hundred and three when he died.
The paper reports that he left behind 2 children, 9 grandchildren, 18 great grandchildren and a 30 foot hole where the crematorium used to be.
View from the Pew 