Wanted: humane fly killer

People are so ungrateful: the weather got so hot we could barely breathe and spent a lot of time moving fans from A to B or floating in the pool. Then (of course) the weather broke with attendant thunder, lightning and a brief but hard downpour.

The gods laughed and blessed us with house flies. One day there were none, after the rain the kitchen was infested. Every flat surface had its fly and the fly's friends.

Caught unawares, all we had to deal with them were tapettes, long handled, flexible plastic bats in horrid colours, a woven 'face' with huge eyes and evil grin. But flies is wise, they almost never sit on a surface where they can be hit without something else being damaged, like a tea-cup or jam-jar.

Presumably - well, hopefully - these flies had hatched outside and had come in through open windows and doors. Fly maggots in the outside rubbish bins is understandable, but inside...ugh.

A hurried trip to the hardware store produced a new version fly killer, a transparent one that is put on the windows. This is a great aesthetic improvement on the old suspended swirls of glue strips though the principle is the same: fly is attracted, fly touches, fly dies. There is no humane killer for flies.

To comfort myself I went for a walk down to the farthest field, to that area of land known as Greece. It was warm and sunny. One butterfly was so doped by the sun that I was able to get close enough to photograph it with my phone. Do butterflies snore?

Oh. the bliss of sun on one's wings!

On the rapidly drying tall grasses, were numerous very, very small blue butterflies. Perhaps they were the classic ones that live only on the kidney vetch plant, which do grow in the former horse fields and also in Greece. I could not get close enough to identify them as my shadow disturbed. If it was the classic Very Small Blue, its latin name is cupido minimus. Enough to make anyone sentimental.

However, I could recognise the meadow browns which were also drifting around the few scabious left, settling on a grass stem and closing their wings so that the one menacing black 'eye' showed clearly.

All this quite made up for the flies – and the maggots in the waste bins.