Spring glanced at the garden this week, brought out the plum blossom, magnificently white and sweet smelling, and the ‘pond’ filled with amorous frogs, shrieking, giggling and splashing ecstatically at all hours of the night and VERY early morning. Now it’s rumoured to be freezing again. Apple blossom still shy, but I remain optimistic.
Such is the miracle of even the most hesitant moments of spring because along with the ecstatic frogs and absurdly pretty plum blossom came the most horrifyingly appalling infestation of flies. Some tiny and creeping, crawling into and on to and under and inside things I didn’t even know had an inside or an underside; some enormous vast and loathsome, mutating monstrous beasts, lumbering along the walls and carpet like the vile progeny of sexually disturbed helicopters.
Then I remembered. Something, I thought, had died. Some weeks ago this was, but not so long that I couldn’t remember the nauseating stench of what I suspected at the time was a dying or dead rodent, somewhere wholly inaccessible and invisible: something for which I chased and searched and hunted and stalked, until, eventually the stench became a smell which became a distant memory and finally vanished. Then came the flies. Whatever it was is producing these creatures at rate equalled only by our esteemed government’s capacity to turn refugees into criminals. Could it, horror of Hitchcockian horrors, be the rotting corpse of the The C Word’s most loathed, his Royal Loathsomeness, the Minister for Immigration, Borders, Detention camps and the Gulag: The Miserable Byrne. Had someone finally done for him, and in some unspeakably cruel twist of fate, dumped his vile twitching remains under MY BATH? Was it now my task to count his crimes which swarmed pitilessly around my bathroom and kitchen, yea unto the very fruit bowl containing the garlic meant to ward off such hideous evil?
Well, the refugees running the shops down the road provided all manner of toxic spray, the migrant workers running the shops in Green Lanes came up with the most viscously sticky fly papers imaginable, unspeakably disgusting but highly effective, and the asylum-seeking dancing-pal came and blocked up the holes in my bathroom thus excluding further invasion by the vile progeny of Byrne.
Who shall we expel, the Home Office Minister or the Immigrants?
No contest really.
