When those damned flies come home...

What happens when September turns warm in Mayo and every flying insect in Connacht decides to visit? 

Here I sit, dear readers, at my keyboard in the townland of Castlebar, as another winged fury passes by my well-attuned ear before slapping the window in a frenzy of buzzing and headbanging. September in Mayo, that treacherous month when summer makes its last desperate stand before the Atlantic winds reclaim their dominion, has brought with it an invasion more thorough than anything the Vikings managed in their most ambitious moments.

The bluebottle has moved in. Big as you please, buzzing around my kitchen like some demented emerald priest giving last rites to yesterday's bin offerings. One moment I am enjoying a peaceful cup of tea and contemplating the eternal mysteries of why Fine Gael and Fianna Fail identify as separate entities, and the next I am engaged in aerial combat with a creature that possesses all the tactical acumen of a drunken fighter pilot and twice the persistence.

These are not your common or garden variety flies, oh no. These are the special forces of the dipteran world, each one apparently briefed on the precise location of my morning toast and equipped with supernatural powers of resurrection. Strike one down with a tea towel and two more materialise from the ether. Swat them with yesterday's Irish Independent and they return with reinforcements and what appears to be a grudge.

The bluebottles are irritating enough, but they're just the warm-up act. Then comes the fruit flies, tiny suicide bombers, apparently operating on intelligence that somewhere in my kitchen lurks a banana past its prime. Word must have gone out across the county because they arrive like shoppers at a Dunnes' sale - small, determined, and mentally deranged. These diminutive devils, no larger than full stops gone rogue, have the remarkable ability to appear simultaneously in 17 different locations while possessing the flight patterns of creatures who have clearly never attended pilot training.

One might suppose that creatures of such diminutive stature would possess proportionally modest ambitions, but this would be to gravely underestimate the fruit fly's capacity for causing maximum irritation with minimum physical presence. They swarm around a wine glass with the persistence of unsuccessful politicians at election time, diving into a resting Guinness, and generally conducting themselves with reckless abandon.

I have attempted various defensive strategies, each more futile than the last. The traditional newspaper rolled into a weapon of mass insect destruction proves as effective against fruit flies as a hurley would be against a cloud of midges. Chemical warfare, in the form of those aerosol sprays that promise swift and merciless death to all airborne pests, succeeds only in poisoning the atmosphere while leaving the intended victims apparently invigorated by the experience.

There is something particularly galling about being outwitted by creatures whose brains, if they possess such organs at all, must be smaller than the head of a pin. Yet here I am, a grown man who has survived decades of Mayo football disappointments and successive governments' promises of rural development, reduced to flailing about my own kitchen like some sort of demented conductor.

The bluebottles and fruit flies are merely the support band. Late September wasps are the headliners, and they're an entirely different proposition from those amiable summer drunks who potter about in the apple trees like tipsy pensioners. These are the desperate ones, the kamikaze pilots of the insect world who've clocked that winter's round the corner and have decided to go out in a blaze of spite.

You'd think I'd know better by now, but apparently optimism is like herpes - it keeps coming back when you least expect it. Then comes the sound - not the boozy buzz of the bluebottle or the barely audible whine of the fruit fly, but the thunderous, unmistakable drone of a wasp the size of a small aircraft, who has clearly been dining well all season and has no intention of yielding to the conventional wisdom that suggests he should be dead by now. 

This is no weakened, end-of-season creature stumbling toward its natural demise, but rather a magnificent yellow and black bomber, fat with summer's bounty and possessed of the sort of aggressive confidence that comes from being armed with a sabre attached to one's posterior. The morning coffee transforms instantly from a peaceful ritual into a scene from some aerial warfare documentary, as this well-fed warrior conducts a reconnaissance mission with the casual menace of a creature who knows perfectly well that one ill-timed gesture on my part will result in an injection of venom that will leave me looking like a man who has argued with Conor McGregor about his Presidential ambitions.

The truly infuriating part isn't the insects themselves, but the maddening sangfroid of everyone else.

"They'll be gone by October," my other half observes, watching a bluebottle conduct aerial manoeuvres around the fruit bowl with all the concern she might show for a passing shower. This is the sort of fatalistic logic that suggests a migraine is perfectly tolerable because it's not permanent, or that food poisoning is rather charming because it only lasts a weekend. 

"Just ignore them," suggests my blithely indifferent son, displaying the sort of youthful naivety that comes from believing that all of life's problems can be solved by pretending they don't exist.

Ignore them? I might as well ignore a pipe band marching through the sitting room or the sound of Westlife performing in the garden shed. These creatures have not read the manual on being ignored. They have, it seems, attended advanced courses in attention-seeking behaviour and graduated with honours.

The timing is what really does your head in. Most of the year, Irish insects behave with proper Protestant reserve - they know the weather is dismal so they stay hidden like sensible creatures. You get the odd wasp in June, looking confused, maybe a few flies when the temperature hits double digits, but generally they have the good sense to keep quiet during our 11 months of meteorological disappointment. But give us one week of genuine warmth, one brief taste of Mediterranean possibility, and suddenly every flying thing in Mayo considers my kitchen their personal holiday destination.

The true genius of these creatures reveals itself only in the sacred hours of attempted slumber when one has finally surrendered to exhaustion and retreated to the sanctuary of the bedroom. There, having performed the evening ritual of switching off the light and settling into the blessed darkness, one is greeted by that most diabolical of sounds - the solitary buzz of a fly who has apparently been waiting all day for precisely this moment of vulnerability. This is psychological warfare of the highest order, a single creature transforming a peaceful bedroom into a theatre of nocturnal madness. I am out of bed, the light switched back on, armed with nothing but flailing hands and mounting hysteria, embarking upon a dance of desperation as the buzzing stops, only to return the instant you lie down, and seems to emanate from multiple locations simultaneously, as if the creature has mastered the art of acoustic ventriloquism. I may swat vainly at the elusive invader, knocking over water glasses, tumbling books like a man possessed, as my tormentor conducts its aerial ballet with the precision of a creature who clearly understands that sleep is a luxury that must be earned through combat.

So here I sit, attended by my personal flying squadron, trying to work out precisely when I turned into the sort of man who gets systematically humiliated by creatures smaller than pencil shavings. With any luck by tomorrow morning, Ireland will remember it's supposed to be September, cold, wet, and thoroughly inhospitable to anything with unfeathered wings. The flies will bugger off to wherever flies go to die, and I can return to worrying about everyday things like the price of sliced pan and whether that noise the car's making means I'm about to become very well acquainted with the local garage.

Until then, I remain your correspondent in the trenches, armed with nothing but stubbornness and the faint hope that October might bring mercy.