Something revolting

This will disgust you, or at least I hope it will. It certainly disgusted me. With any luck, it might even make you vomit.

Over the past few days, I've noticed an awful lot of bluebottles around the house, but you get that sort of thing during such exceptionally warm weather. Now, I hate them. I find them absolutely repulsive, as most people do, and I have no qualms about murdering them.

You might have read Tristram Shandy once upon a time. (Wrinkly Paddy lent it to me years ago, and I read it in a tent during a haphazard wander across the continent of Europe, whenever I was sober enough to see). Anyhow, as far as it concerns bluebottles, his uncle Toby has a different take on life to me, and this is what he says:

Uncle Toby gave the fly which buzz'd about his nose all dinner-time, — "Go, — go, poor devil, " quoth he, — "get thee gone, — why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me."

And so it is, and so I feel when confronted by a single bluebottle. I can, and do, hold the window open to let the horrible bastard escape, for violence is simply not in my nature. Ordinarily, that is. But when confronted with more than five bluebottles, my heart fills with murder, and I wish only to kill each and every one of them, for which I find the vacuum cleaner very effective. (You move the open pipe towards them very slowly and they make a satisfying clunk as they're sucked down the hose. I suppose to them it's a kind of black hole. The trick is to get the event horizon right so they're in freefall before they even realise what's happening).

This was different, though. There were so many around, the hoover wouldn't do, and I don't like spraying poison, so I just opened a window and shooshed most of them out, leaving the stupid ones for me to kill. Now, I noticed that the upstairs living-room had a huge amount of the fuckers at the windows and clinging to the curtains, but I was able to get rid of them easily enough by shoving them out the window. However, when I came back there was another pile of the fuckers. What the-?? That room isn't used much at the moment. The rebuilding project hasn't yet reached that far.

I tried a little experiment. I made sure that every bluebottle in that room was either cleared or murdered. Then I locked the door and went away to do other things, like flinging old mattresses at passing tinkers. When I got back and checked the upstairs living room, it was like a scene from The Omen: a roomful of big fat juicy fucking flies. Oh Jesus, this is doing my fucking head in.

Either,

1. I've inadvertently pushed pieces of meat into all the tiny cracks in the plaster while under the influence of some psychosis-inducing drug.

2. My neighbours have inadvertently pushed pieces of meat into all the tiny cracks in the plaster while under the influence of some psychosis-inducing drug.

3. There's a dead person under the floor.

4. The house is possessed by Satan.

5. Flies like it here.

6. They must be coming down the chimney.

Now why the fuck would they do that? I remembered the old Sherlock Holmes maxim that, when you eliminate all other possibilities, that which remains – no matter how improbable – is the answer. And so I dug out my trusty set of chimney-rods, gave it a good old rattle, and sure enough I got a little avalanche of twigs and other crap down on top of me, so there was a crow's nest. But how does that explain the flies? No answer.

I lit a small fire, hoping the smoke would drive the flies up the chimney, but what really happened was this. There came a loud rumbling noise as if the house was going to explode, but which was really just some stuff half-way up the chimney catching fire. I bent closer to see what was going on and as I did, something fell down the chimney and into the fire. Something in flames. A burning dead bird.

As the mechanic would say: there's yer problem, Missus!