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Oceania » Australia » Victoria » Melbourne » Lilydale
July 2nd 2010
Published: July 2nd 2010
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What can I say? I haven't blogged in a little while, have I? Sorry about that... but here are THREE in a row!

The first, below, is a repeat, just to get you back in the swing of things and make you laugh. That's because the second is a bit intense, to say the least. To some of you it will mean little, to others a little too much, and I apologise for any distress caused. All I can suggest is that you read the third, immediately afterwards, to take your mind off things.

I'm just excited to be blogging again, and looking forward to your feedback. This blog, or a potential sister project, might turn into something more than just a series of postcards, so do keep reading and spread the word, even to those who don't know me please.

Karen said that this wouldn't look out of place in a Sunday supplement, which thrilled me to bits. Enjoy!

Flies

I am reclining in a comfortable seat, one of a scattered crowd of those elite sport obsessives, domestic cricket fans - our numbers, in the hundreds, seemingly reduced to a mere handful by the vast, cavernous majesty of the MCG. I am bathed in glorious sunshine but have access to ample shade, sun block and water, not to mention beer on tap just yards away. I am privileged to be witnessing a majestic innings from Victorian batsman David Hussey, as he cruises past 150 in typically flawless fashion, putting the hapless Queensland bowlers to the sword…

Why, then, am I unutterably miserable? It’s because of flies.

I hate flies. Back home I was never a huge fan - they and I had a particularly acrimonious falling out during a camping tour of Scotland with Granny and Grandpa late one summer - but I considered them fairly harmless, and reserved my more murderous energies for wasps, because they sting you and it hurts. Here, though, wasps assume the status of long lost friends, pitching up unannounced to add vibrant colour to an impromptu picnic, in comparison to the devil’s miniature flying henchmen; those tiny black harbingers of irritation; express couriers of all that is dark and unholy. Flies are little bastards.

“But what about the mozzies?” I hear you cry. Mosquitoes are far from ideal companions in an outdoor situation, don’t get me wrong. They love my susceptible English flesh, too. I’ve undressed at night to find my skin (ALL of it, until I took to tucking my Tshirt into my boxer shorts) riddled with welts and sores the size of conkers, which feel like they’re on fire until I apply some strangely addictive soothing menthol lotion. That doesn’t bother me though: I hope you’ll agree that I’m an easy going sort, on the whole; like a wasp sting or a hair in my soup, I take it in my stride.

Flies, though, don’t leave such a friendly time bomb of discomfort, a chuckling reminder of the time you unwittingly shared with them. Oh no. This evil with an exoskeleton is, quite literally, in your face. It brings its torment to you live and exclusively, as it happens. It’s breaking news that breaks your concentration. Flies are the Sky Sports News of perpetual annoyance.

I don’t get angry with people. I know as well as anyone that we’re all flawed, and if someone lets me down, or even deliberately harms me, I tend to put it down to their having a bad day, or just some sort of misunderstanding. I do, sometimes, get really, really angry though, my face turning red with frustration as the air turns blue with my language. I get angry with, for instance, computers: inanimate objects masquerading as patronising masters of our intentions; allegedly useful tools designed, admittedly by people, for the apparent purpose of making us unhappy. I have often, in particularly abject moments of technological hell, stated that I wish computers could feel pain, so that I might inflict it on them.

This is the sort of anger that I feel towards flies. It’s a futile, directionless anger, the knowledge of which only fuels my anger further. I can’t reason with flies: if a person persistently exhibited such antisocial behaviour and failed to respond to my impassioned pleas for solitude, I could involve the courts; flies are immune to such resorts, and no amount of insane buzzing and targeted tickling will ever lead to them being sectioned under the mental health act or served with a restraining order.

At the height of my vendetta against flies I finally found the words to express this hatred, and I repeat them to you now with some trepidation, but in the hope that catharsis can be found in laying bare the darkest machinations of my mind: “I don’t just want to kill flies. No, death is too good for them. I want to kill their children first, and make them watch.”

The use of the past tense in that last paragraph will have alerted some of you to the possibility of a happy ending to this tale of hatred and anger, and you’d be right to suspect as much. Flies will never be my friends, and they and I will continue to have frequent disagreements, but the worst is over. After two months of exasperation at people’s insistence that I’ll “get used to it”, I finally have, and the secret is in the elimination of The Aussie Wave.

The Aussie Wave is the official national gesture of Australia, like a French shrug or Japanese bow. It is deployed whenever flies are within earshot, or physical reach, with the intention of distancing said flies from oneself. My theory is that it was introduced to the populous in the 1960s, as the twin developments of haute couture and mass global communication suddenly exposed the hitherto acceptable wide brimmed hat with dangling corks to the incredulous laughter of three billion foreigners. The Aussie Wave can be seen everywhere you look, particularly during early evening on a hot day; actual Aussies, whom for now I’ll define as all those with the accent, can perform the gesture several hundred times a day and still proceed with a normal existence, unhindered by the sight of their own flailing hands, not to mention those hands becoming temporarily unavailable for other duties. The continual success of Australia as a functioning society, let alone as one of the foremost sporting nations on the planet, is testament to this blindness to The Aussie Wave: it’s a miracle of multi tasking.

I’m not an actual Aussie though, and I never will be, so to me The Aussie Wave, each time I perform it, incapacitates me entirely, putting on hold all other projects, from cleaning my teeth to, worringly enough, driving a car. That’s the point though! I’M the one causing the distraction. It was a thought process as long and tortured as your current experience at the hands of this blog that led me to this startling conclusion: the only thing more irritating than flies is my automatic physical response to their presence; eliminate the Aussie Wave, and my fly induced misery is over.

So now I just let ‘em buzz. I’d still rather they weren’t there, but they’re a darn sight less annoying now that I’m not flailing about like a malfunctioning windmill trying to get rid of them.

I am reclining in a comfortable seat, one of a scattered crowd of those elite sport obsessives, junior tennis fans. I am bathed in glorious sunshine but have access to ample shade, sun block and water. A rotund English woman wearing a red dress that may have been used as a parachute in a previous life sits a few seats away from me, scowling at the cruel environment that she has flown halfway round the world to experience. She jabs, parries, sweeps expansively with both hands, but the flies keep on buzzing.

I mutter under my breath: “Bloody tourists…”

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