Just buzzing by ...

Press, 16 January 1988, Page 16

Just buzzing by ...

Hot summer nights mark the beginning of exciting evenings in bedrooms all over New Zealand. Now is the time when pyjama-clad figures leap about in nothing short of a frenzy in an effort to annihilate those uninvited winged visitors which are hell-bend on destroying any idea you may have had of sleep. My father, while eccentric in some respects, has a perfectly normal reac-

tion to things that fly past in the night. Seek and destroy. Thus, when confronted with a blowfly of Boeing proportions in his bedroom the other night, he proceeded to empty a whole can of flyspray on it.

He then spent the next few hours keeping my mother awake by discussing the possibility of the blowfly rising like Lazarus from the dead and maliciously landing in his mouth while he slept. Calling on years of patience, acquired by raising three children, my mother managed to lull him into sleep by promising she would not let the nasty blowfly get him. This accomplished, they

settled down for what was left of the night. Whereupon a moth promptly started revving up on the west runway between the wardrobe and the bedside table. Having already spent his heavy artillery on the blowfly, my father had no choice but to engage in hand to moth combat before retreating with dignity under the duvet. I have yet to meet anyone who can calmly sleep in the same room as something which whirrs, buzzes, or flutters. It seems irrational that in a bedroom measuring three by four metres an insect measuring just one centimetre can cause such havoc. Even more so when you consider that

the chances of that same insect finding an open mouth to land in (allow seven centimetres) are so remote as to be neglible. Ears, the second favourite orifice of insects, offer only an average of a three centimetre landing pad. No moth worth its wings would attempt a landing in pitch-dark in those conditions. But rational thought flies out the window when a whirry-beastie flies in it. Only very small children are fascinated rather than frightened, and I feel my short, nervous laugh did not fool my two-year-old son the other night when he unfolded a sticky little hand to reveal a damp and disorientated

moth. "Bumble,” he said proudly. "Let’s put Bumble outside,” I suggested. Bumble was ceremoniously taken outside hnd placed on the bedroom windowsill.

“Night night Bumble,” said my son, patting him kindly on the head and reducing him to a silvery pulp. I looked at him speculatively, wondering how much I could save on flyspray this summer by getting him to pat all Bumbles and their relatives into submission.

Dragging him out of bed in the middle of the night to catch moths seems a little radical, and probably contravenes the

Child Labour Act. I turn to my next tower of strength, my husband. His reply to "just ignore tham and they will go away” does not still my beating heart. I retaliate with gory stories of oil being poured into ears to float insects to the top, of moths blocking air-passages at the back of the throat and finally, the worst threat of all. ,

“Moths,” I hissed, “eat Levis!” Feeling just a touch guilty I disappeared back under the duvet while he stalked the moth. Several hours later I was woken from a deep sleep by a tired by triumphant man. “I got it,” he said, presenting it to me like the head of John the Baptist. Revenge was indeed his.