12 January 2017
Bandits at 12 o’clock
Killing mosquitoes.
By Chin Chin
“Buzz, Buzz, Buzz…” wrote the great ursine poet and philosopher W.T.Poo on finding himself surrounded by bees. Those of us who have had the pleasure of reading the story to a child (and what greater pleasure could there be) will recall that the episode came to a painful conclusion in a gorse bush. The lesson is that aggressive insects breed distress, so it was with some concern that I heard the dread whine of an angry mosquito just as I was putting pen to paper to write this article. Well, that’s given it away, hasn’t it? A mosquito in January? That must mean the southern hemisphere and indeed it does. Is your correspondent surrounded by convicts with corks bobbing around their hats? No! Probably New Zealand then. Yes indeed, and in this case the buzzing occurred at the south end of the North Island where the mosquitoes are every bit as voracious as they are back at home.
People have their own ways of dealing with aerial pests. The well-coordinated can pick them off by throwing books, socks or some other form of domestic ordinance. A perfectly placed throw at a range of 10 feet or so strikes the insect stone dead and possibly (and you do have to be good to do this) allows it to drop into the waste basket without making a mark on the wall. Such skills, however, are rare and need talent as well as practice. Occasionally too they miscarry and I remember a master at school who could be relied on to eliminate an insect on the window with a blind throw of Kennedy’s “First Latin Primer”, a book which always seemed to land flat against the glass, overlooking the fact that the window was open. The classical sixth having a first-floor room, it dropped into the car park where it struck a visiting parent on the head. Whether the impact increased his knowledge of the classics through some form of percussive instruction, or whether it reduced his ability to retain any information at all, it is hard to know.
For us mere mortals, throwing with such precision is out of the question, so there are two possibilities. One is to decoy the insect out of the room by turning on a light in the corridor and then closing the door on it. That is fine in principle but doesn’t work too well if another insect flies in. Getting the second one into the corridor while not letting the first one back into the room needs the same skills as those puzzles, so beloved by manufacturers of Christmas crackers, which require you to get a series of little silver balls into different parts of a plastic frame at the same time. It looks easy but somehow it isn’t. The better answer is the fly-swat and it is on that which I am relying as I struggle to write this article.
Like cricket bats, fly-swats have got bigger over the years. Nowadays they are several inches wide to reduce the risk of either a left handed or right handed swing taking the insect beyond the outside edge. When I was at school we would have sneered at that. One of the high points of summer was the occasion when a wasp would fight its way into the junior study. In those days boys were less pampered than they are now and the junior study (a room which would just take five small desks and five lockers) was the daytime home of five boys. Normally it was a place of repose, even on occasion of learning, but when a wasp came in all that changed. The door was closed and a wasp hunt began.
There were a number of rules. The first was that the only weapon permitted was a 12 inch ruler. A wasp in flight is quite slow but, even so, to strike it with a ruler requires accuracy. Then too, and to those who are used to field sports this will come as no surprise, there was to be no striking of a sitting wasp. It had to be hit on the wing. Fashion in those days required that studies be draped in fabric remnants until they resembled the inside of Arabian tents. That meant plenty of places for the wasp to hide; plenty of places from which it could emerge to sting those hunting it. The third rule was that the window had to be partly open to allow the quarry a chance of escape. That was only fair. After all the school was in the Welsh borders and not in Spain.
Once the door had been closed, five boys armed with rulers would try to hunt down the wasp. The manifest object was to kill it with a clean smack in the air but there were a few subtexts as well. There was obvious satisfaction in getting the wasp to sting one of your companions but, if you could not achieve that, a smart blow across the ear with a cry of “oops, missed it” would do almost as well. The result was mayhem. Imagine five lads in a very confined space, all whacking furiously at the wasp, at each other and at anything else that moved with the wasp getting in an occasional sting and you will have a very good idea of what heaven is like for a 14-year-old boy.
In these days of anti-bloodsport sentiment it would be beneath the dignity of your correspondent to derive as much joy from the use of his fly-swat. In any case to kill a mosquito requires cunning so it is a question of creeping about and hoping that the prey will settle, preferably not on the new wallpaper.After a fruitless hour or so it becomes tedious but the hunt cannot be abandoned. Mosquitoes are ungrateful beasts and if you leave them undisturbed they will await their opportunity and then attack the back of your neck when you are least expecting it. In the end there is only one way to settle the matter.Out with the can of fly spray and strafe the insect as it flies past.
Fly spray is fatal to mosquitoes. I suspect that in large doses it is bad for human beings too and goodness knows what the propellant does to the atmosphere. Environmental considerations alone should make it a weapon of last resort but It is not these concerns which make me ashamed to use it. It is the dreadful unsportingness of it and an awful consciousness of the contempt it would have evoked in the junior study some fifty years ago.
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