So you’re in Australia, on the first day of a heatwave with temperatures
forecast to hit 39-40 degrees C for the next three days. You do all
your important work early in the morning before it gets too hot. Guests
have just left and in your innocence, you say, “I’m going to air the
guest room for a bit, while it’s still cool-ish.” So you open the
French doors.
Ten minutes later, you re-enter the room and find yourself in an
impromptu scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. There are flies
everywhere – all over the ceiling and walls and every available surface.
Hundred of flies, possibly thousands – you’ve never seen anything like
this before. There’s several dozen large flesh-eating blowflies, oodles
of those medium-sized annoying bushflies that crawl into people’s eyes
and up their noses, hordes of tiny little flies with lacy wings, and a
plethora of midges, all over every surface you can see.
After the initial shock of seeing this mass gathering of the order
Diptera all over the room, you grow freshly alarmed at the thought that
they might do number twos all over your pristine white ceiling and
plaster. So you brainstorm ways to remove them quickly. Fly spray is
not an option – you don’t like poisoning people, not even strangers, and
it might actually make the cleanup messier to kill all these insects.
You experiment with chasing them back out of the open French doors, but
the buzzing dark clouds you raise from one surface just re-settle on
another.
So you hit upon the idea of vacuuming them all up. That should work,
but it’s going to be extremely tedious. So you close the French doors,
get your iPod, and work to music while you stand on a chair and run the
sofa attachment in sweeps all over the ceiling, and then the walls. The
midges all get sucked down the vortex first go; the little lacy-winged
flies are nearly as easy. The bushflies require chasing and
persistence. The blowflies are very tricky to catch – it’s best to wait
until they settle on the door glass, and then go after them.
The iPod starts to play Lullaby when you’re back to standing on
your chair, extending the vacuum wand all over the place like some
long-limbed insectivore having a rather extended dinner – and you think,
“Perfect! Yes! This is as excellent as when Golden Brown came on by fortuitous coincidence when I emptied the compost toilet cartridge into the hot compost bin last year!”
And as you’re suctioning up hundreds of flies, you sing along, with dark emphasis, to the bit that goes, “The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight!” Bwahahahahaha!
This wasn’t work I really needed, on top of everything. I shall have to organise a flyscreen for those French doors. But, it was work made not only bearable, but memorable, by that musical coincidence!