Roger Moroney: The season of the fly...and the rolled up paper

Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.

This is the time of resolutions.

New Year's resolutions, but I don't subscribe to that because you should be able to resolve to do something at any time of the year... why leave it for another 360-odd days?

Rather than make a resolution I would rather make an admission.

So then, how do I put this?

Simple... I am a mass killer.

Ahh, I feel better already... better than those who fell at my feet as I embarked on missions without mercy.

Oh woe is me... but it has to be brought out into the open and I shall incur whatever consequences fate delivers me.

Last Saturday I killed not one, but 11 flies.

On the Sunday, when the heat stepped up even more I killed 14.

Summer is the season of the heat and is also the season of the fly, and when you find a shady spot outside to sit and read or take a quiet fews sips of something they emerge.

And when they smell slightly perspiration-warmed human skin they home in.

So if I am reading I have a rolled up old paper with me.

I take it outside more often than a tube of sunscreen.

It has become second nature.

Sitting outside for a spell?

Take the rolled up old newspaper.

So yep, over that weekend I took out 25 of the tenacious brutes.

They buzz... I bash.

Add to that the ones I swatted on the Thursday and Friday and I daresay it would be enough to make at least one fritter.

Which reminds me of that fascinating sweet treat filled with sultanas and other squishy things which was dubbed a "fly cemetery".

No wonder they didn't sell many at the old school gala back in '64.

While they looked a treat the sign the kid had put together for what his mother had made and donated for sale was not.

It was bad enough that he'd used the term "fly cemeteries" on the sign but adding a drawing he'd done of a bunch of them being whisked into a bowl sort of put the kibosh on it.

The one thing that intrigues me though about this whole fly menace business.

For when you reach out and pick up the rolled up paper to clear them from the itching legs they seem to know... and stay away.

But when you put the paper sway down again within seconds they home back in.

It makes me slightly uncomfortable that I have been mass killing an apparently very intuitive and intelligent creature, and as I write this I have also become uncomfortable with the notion that those I dispatched probably had mums and dads and brothers and sisters.

And maybe they were visiting here during their school holidays.

I daresay that before the week is done I shall receive a letter from some outfit with a name like PIN (protect insects now) who will remind me in no uncertain terms that even pesky flies are God's creatures, to which I can only reply that he's clearly got sick of the beastly things at his digs and sent them here.

And I shall probably also be reminded that without flies the manufacturers of fly screens, swats, sprays and those weird whirly propeller things you put on tables to keep them away would all go out of business.

Yes it is the season of the fly alright, and they love to stop by and say hello.

As one has just done now.

How he got into the office is anyone's guess but there he is.

Watching me rolling up a newspaper.

Maybe he followed me from home.

Crikey, there's another one... he's brought his mate with him.

Oh enough of this fly business... time to zip it (groan).