True Flies

I HATE FLIES!

What do you call a fly without any wings?... A WALK!
How do you make an Elephant fly?.. You start with a zipper that's two foot long.

We joke about flies, but they are not funny; they annoy the shit out of me!!!!!! Where do they come from? The smart-alecs amongst you are probably saying something along the lines of..."When a mummy and a daddy fly love each other very much, they have a special cuddle...." but I don't mean where do they originate, but where are they when they aren't trying to crawl up my nose?

You know the scenario, you step outside the door and you haven't travelled six feet before there are a dozen or so vieing for the title of most annoying by seeing who can get you to swat them first, the one up the nose, the one in your ear, or the one that gets in behind your glasses!

Where are they before this?

Are they flying around aimlessly for hours, lurking near doorways and thoroughfares hour after hour? Surely they would die of exertion. Or are there special places like taxi ranks where they sit and wait for some unsuspecting creature to step out? And how do they know this? Is it nature or nurture? How do they know that we smell, or have dribble or snot up our noses that they like? How do they know to lurk near doorways?

I have looked outside my door and not seen a single fly ANYWHERE, and yet before I can get off the verandah they are in my ears, buzzing around my face and getting me angry. Then... ZOOOOOM, there's a hundred of the little buggers all doing the same! And they are cunning little bastards too. Perhaps they have some hitherto unknown communication between themselves and they wait for you to have both hands full and then yell out to their mates that you are not able to swat them so they come in droves.

It's true!!!! I have walked out sometimes and had a few buzzing around my head, but it's when I have both hands full that they are at their most vicious and seem extra-determined to find there way inside my head from one of the 7 openings in it!!!

Where is the Aerogard I hear you say, or the other forms of repellent? Well.. what can I say... most are useless, with the Tropical strength Aerogard being about the best, but even that doesn't work like it used to. They still fly around my head and touch down for a fraction of a second and then take off again. Used to be that they wouldn't come near you, now the little bastards find that 1/4 of a square centimetre that you missed when you put the repellent on and they sit there and annoy the crap out of you!

The famous Outback explorer, road builder and writer Len Beadell raised the question in one of his excellent books, that if two people meeting in the outback arrived with their own cloud of a 100 or so flies, when they parted, would the flies stay with the original carrier or would some of them switch places? I am told that certain flies are attracted to certain smells, but they seem pretty indiscriminent to me, so Len... no mate, I am sure you would leave with different flies than you arrived with and probably more or less depending on which of the two of you had showered the most recently.

I take my hat off to you Len, you built those bomb roads in the 50s and 60s, for years battling the outback, the Landrover and the flat tyres. I would have given up after three days because of the FLIES!!!!! You're a better man than I am Gunga Din!