Tag: Flies

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Living in the centre of busy, bustling Bodrum means compromise. Hubbub abounds. It comes with the territory. It’s part of the charm. We filter out the mad traffic, high-pitched horns and loud rows. We’re from the Smoke and old London Town is not so different. It’s the price worth paying for the short skip to the marina inns and eateries that serve to remind us that we’re sophisticated boys about town (or so we think). Calm country living in the middle of a muddy field is not our style. But, (here comes the but) we are wrestling with the double whammy of ferocious, veracious miniscule flies and barking mad, howling hounds. The midget midges circle us like we’re rotting corpses. The mozzie net has been re-erected above our bed as our only line of defence.

The flies will die but there’s no easy solution for the dogs. As all emigreys know, most Turks have an entirely different relationship with man’s best friend. Here in Bodrum you will see some dogs on leads but they tend to be the toy variety attached to the over-dressed well-to-do. Most mutts hereabouts perform the traditional guard and protect function, chained up outside. For our considerable sins we’re surrounded by four of them. Passage down our busy thoroughfare, even in the small hours, is constant. So too is the barking. We’re serenaded by quadrophonic yapping 24 hours a day. Have people not heard of house alarms?

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The Perfidious Turk

Road Kill

Freddie the Fat Fly

When you move to warmer climes, you expect to be bothered by bugs. There’s no Jack Frost to kill the critters off. Last night I was bothered by the fattest fly I have ever seen. Fat Freddie was the jumbo jet of flies and danced here and there but mostly danced around me. I’d always thought flies to be more of a nuisance than a menace until I looked up Wikipedia to discover that the humble house fly can carry over 100 pathogens. These include typhoid, cholera, salmonella, bacillary dysentery, tuberculosis, anthrax, ophthalmia, and parasitic worms. Well, fancy that. ‘Don’t mess with me, Freddie,’ I warned. ‘I’m fatter than you and I have WMDs.‘ Fat Freddie took no heed. Fearing terminal consumption and a bad case of the runs, I zapped the feckless fat fly with Raid. That was the end of Freddie.

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Fat Fly Season

It’s a Bugs Life

A Biblical Plague

We’ve been little troubled by mozzies thus far though I expect this not to last. However, the apartment has been infested by a plague of flies of biblical proportions. Liam and I lay in our bed like great white hunters armed with cans of ‘Raid’ taking pot shots at the swarming pestilence. By morning, the floor was carpeted with the wreckage like a scene from the Battle of Britain.