Summer Pestilence
Over the last few weeks our house has become the fashionable holiday resort of the fruit fly. They have decided that our kitchen is their Crimea and here they drift in slow motion: tiny hang-gliders held aloft on miasmic thermals of vegetable-gases, alighting wherever fancy takes them,
"Ooh! Stan! There's a lovely vile vapour emanating from that fruit bowl! Shall we settle there and luxuriate in the over-ripe ooze?"
At first, we didn't much notice them; they are small and silent. But within a week we had become the Fruit Fly Butlins: aunts and uncles, nieces and cousins, brothers and sisters soon all arrived, intent on enjoying their two-day lifecycle in the balmy Utopia of our kitchen.
Like cockroaches, the fruit fly seems to have an iron-constitution. Yesterday, as I took a bowl of steaming, home-made pumpkin soup from the microwave oven, I was shocked to see three of the little creatures drift out, too. They had been circling around with the bowl for three and a half minutes, bombarded with death-rays, and yet, here they were, calm as a rotting cucumber, drifting off to sample new scents as if nothing untoward had happened.
Things quickly escalated, and in the last two days the kitchen began to feel like the fetid, swampy banks of the Great Green Limpopo River. Each morning, our eyes, nose and mouth were peppered with their well-fed, satiated bodies as they gratefully sacrificed themselves on the altar of our faces.
"All hail! Praise thee, oh Great Ones, for what we have greedily received!"
But all Utopias eventually implode, even for these little bastards, and their undoing was swift and merciless. Using the classic Cold War strategy, I set up a Honey Trap, perfect in its simplicity: a glass with a spoonful of mashed banana in it; over this, a tablespoon of cider vinegar and a squashed grape; seal the glass with glad-wrap; punch a hole through this with a pencil. Leave overnight in their favoured gathering place. Watch them flock in their thousands.
This morning as I stood in our sparkling, coffee-scented, wildlife-free kitchen, perhaps I experienced a touch of regret as I surveyed the carnage contained in the fruit fly equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta. But as I ran scalding hot water into the mess, that quickly faded.
"Ooh! Stan! There's a lovely vile vapour emanating from that fruit bowl! Shall we settle there and luxuriate in the over-ripe ooze?"
At first, we didn't much notice them; they are small and silent. But within a week we had become the Fruit Fly Butlins: aunts and uncles, nieces and cousins, brothers and sisters soon all arrived, intent on enjoying their two-day lifecycle in the balmy Utopia of our kitchen.
Like cockroaches, the fruit fly seems to have an iron-constitution. Yesterday, as I took a bowl of steaming, home-made pumpkin soup from the microwave oven, I was shocked to see three of the little creatures drift out, too. They had been circling around with the bowl for three and a half minutes, bombarded with death-rays, and yet, here they were, calm as a rotting cucumber, drifting off to sample new scents as if nothing untoward had happened.
Things quickly escalated, and in the last two days the kitchen began to feel like the fetid, swampy banks of the Great Green Limpopo River. Each morning, our eyes, nose and mouth were peppered with their well-fed, satiated bodies as they gratefully sacrificed themselves on the altar of our faces.
"All hail! Praise thee, oh Great Ones, for what we have greedily received!"
But all Utopias eventually implode, even for these little bastards, and their undoing was swift and merciless. Using the classic Cold War strategy, I set up a Honey Trap, perfect in its simplicity: a glass with a spoonful of mashed banana in it; over this, a tablespoon of cider vinegar and a squashed grape; seal the glass with glad-wrap; punch a hole through this with a pencil. Leave overnight in their favoured gathering place. Watch them flock in their thousands.
This morning as I stood in our sparkling, coffee-scented, wildlife-free kitchen, perhaps I experienced a touch of regret as I surveyed the carnage contained in the fruit fly equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta. But as I ran scalding hot water into the mess, that quickly faded.
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