French flies are incredibly irritating.

Their one redeeming feature is that they are incredibly fucking stupid.

They have a habit of taking a fancy to a particular spot and if you try to swat them and miss, they nearly always come back to the same spot a few seconds later so you can have another swipe at them.

For some unknown reason, they like my laptop screen.

I take great exception to any person having a sneak preview of my forthcoming Magnum Opus, let alone a fucking fly, so I keep a fly swatter just in case, to the side of the laptop.  The Magnum Opus must be quite gripping, because they are quite happy to sit there reading it while I smack them one over the head, whereupon they slide gracefully down the screen and into the hinge.  This means that every time I close my laptop lid, there is a grand scrunching noise, which has the added bonus of driving Herself insane.

Herself has a large can of spray which is fuck all use as it just gives the files an incentive to land on me instead.  All the spray does is make the place smell of lemon.  It’s amazing how quickly one can learn to get tired of the smell of lemon.

I’m quite a dab hand with the swatter.  I have actually been know to get three with one swat which isn’t bad, and also quite clever, as they rarely hang around in groups.

So far I have only seen one hornet.

I went upstairs to bed one night and this huger fucker was buzzing around the bedroom.  Herself wasn’t too happy about him so I went down and got the swatter.

By the time I climbed the stairs again, he had taken refuge in the beams and was out of reach.  I gave him a blast of fly spray to dislodge him and then realised something…….

It is not a good idea to piss off a hornet when you are bollock naked.

Boy, was he pissed off!  He did several circuits of the room while I protected those parts of me that needed protection until eventually he landed on the quilt.   I then learned something else – it’s hard to squash a hornet on a very soft surface.

I stunned him in the end, and flicked him out the window.

Somehow he made the flies seem tame.