Some creatures have no shame.
In the last three days we’ve suddenly had houseflies again. (This is more interesting than that sounds.)
Flies when the weather’s hot and the cows are in the next-door field: fair enough. They’re only trying to make a living, after all. Flies in November: hardly cricket.
These don’t look dopey, as end-of-season (would that make them special-offer?) flies normally look, but they’re quite tricky to persuade out of the windows. I thought this was because they’re wide awake and bright enough to think: Cold out there, warm indoors, I know which I prefer. But then one settled on the high-up bit of the kitchen window so I had to fetch something long to encourage it to flee the right way. Fly swat therefore in hand, I reached to open the itty-bitty window, poked roughly towards the insect with the swat, and lo! It went AAGH and fell down dead. TH’DONK onto the top of a (thankfully, lidded) jug. I was left protesting to the hypothetical, but ever-present, observing judge: Came off in me hand, honest, guv. Not guilty!
I suppose something, slightly warmer nights maybe, woke them from their near-death stupor and that excited them so much that they took to whizzing about our rooms in a frenzy of eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow… Whatever, I have felt even less benevolent towards this batch of houseflies than I usually do. That’s not just me. I’m convinced they’re an unprincipled lot.
My beloved mini sedum – the diddy little sprig of sedum that’s growing in the lid from a coffee jar, having missed its vocation (filling a gap in the paving) and made the very best of a bad job by flowering, late but lovely, on my window sill – is one of my prides and joys. It has shown its mettle for more than six months by flourishing despite having no proper home, not even a proper pot and saucer; despite persistent neglect, being unwatered while its parent and siblings were outside being rained on; and despite having no drainage holes in its coffee lid so that when water did arrive it didn’t escape as it ought.
After all that, this housefly
came and fed from it.
Smug or what?
I was shocked.
And the very next thing I found:
Not the most focused attack I’ve ever mustered, but these photos are needed only as evidence. This cheeky piece of fauna did its best (NB ‘its’ is no insult, they’re hermaphroditic) to conceal its presence.
They did tell me that an Easter cactus summering (I presume that’s the equivalent of wintering?) outdoors can be prey to slugs. I thought keeping it in a big bucket sheltered by the shrub the bucket belonged to, which was there waiting its own overdue border planting, and by being tucked between a table and the wall of the house, was protection enough from gastropods as well as overrainedness and sunscorchingness.
But no. I denounce the above impostor. And worse, having ousted that one, I found another masquerading as a piece of damp soil on a leaf. I failed to take any incriminating pictures while this one was trespassing, but took a few mug shots after evicting it.
If photographic material can count towards character witness, how bad these make the trespasser look!
RUSTLE and LUSTRE are anagrams.
This makes me happy.
(Ulster.)
Result!
On a slightly less beautiful note, mmSEASON is an anagram of MEAN MOSS. Can we infer anything from that?
MESS MOAN seems more appropriate.
ASS MEN OM sounds like an unfamiliar kind of Tantric meditation.
Hm.
A title wants to:
- stand out – make your story, poem or book the one someone will turn to first from a list
- be memorable – so readers can recommend your work after it’s wowed them!
- be relevant, of course
- perhaps touch on more than one aspect of the piece, say a literal and a figurative reference
- not give away the ending
- … and yet hint at irresistible content
Half the trouble is that once the piece is written, you (if you’re like me) kind of lose interest, or maybe i mean the creative surge that brought the piece into being rarely sticks around for the thinking up of a title.
So i was interested in Hilary Dixon’s method, which she explains in an interview in the October 2009 issue of Writing Magazine:
I must admit that finding [the title of my first novel] nearly drove me nuts! In the end, I wrote lots of words connected with the novel on a blackboard in my kitchen, where they caught my eye a thousand times a day. After a while, the words seemed to group and cluster, patterns emerged, and one day When Rooks Speak of Love was there.
When i have something long enough to justify that much effort (do i mean effort? time?) waiting for its title, i’ll try this.
“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
October before last, a local boy was killed at the top of our road when a car went into the back of his moped. The road was closed for a few hours. There was a bouquet on that corner and it was replenished for several weeks. His grave in the churchyard just up from here still brims with fresh flowers every day, without fail.
On the first anniversary of his death, i heard that ‘youths’ had thrown stones and mud at the front of his parents’ house, the front door and windows. Chance, i supposed, that it was done on that particular day.
The same happened this month, on the same date.
Really i don’t know how to react. Maybe the death was more than an accident; maybe someone has reason to hate the family. The novel-plotter in my head tries out scenarios that would make sense of this, and even they peter out, false starts. And in the real world, this non-fiction world, i can’t imagine how a person decides, and plans, and goes out expressly, to heap more anguish on top of the misery of people already hurting so much.
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