Musca domestica

Weggis, Switzerland

It really is the last thing I expected of Switzerland. I mean they are so terribly clean, aren’t they? Everything is tidy, everything is precise and everything, well almost everything, is so terribly punctual. Switzerland is definitely the type of place anyone would wish to live until…until…well until the fly. For reasons that escape me the Swiss appear to have mastered most things in life but, for whatever reason, they appear not to have mastered the house fly.

Once is bad luck, twice is misfortune but three times or more? That implies something is terribly wrong; it cannot be thanks to chance. I realise I write these words in the month of August when almost all Swiss snow has vanished. I realise, too, that the cattle I see in the fields are equipped with tails – an item I do not possess - and that flies appear not to trouble them. Yet in the space of a week I have been inside at least a dozen Swiss restaurants and each has been plagued by flies.

You know the problem. You have found that wonderful table, just by the corner window, and you are busy admiring the view. Switzerland does views like no other. Essentially, you are minding your own business, maybe immersed in conversation with a friendly neighbour, and the next thing you know the little black beastie is upon you. It crawls around the edge of your glass, most likely straight from the nearest farmyard, so you swat it away, absent mindedly at first. You cannot squash it, of course, as otherwise your drink ends up on the table or maybe even your lap. But the fly disappears, you relax and 10 seconds later the process starts again. The fly reappears, you go swish with a lazy hand, the fly disappears, you relax and so the cycle continues.

The other day I summoned a waitress to point out three flies that had landed on the edge of my coffee cup and could I have another cup as a result? Apart from the fact that the flies had flown off before she reached my table, she looked at me with total disbelief.

“What on earth is this Britisher talking about?” I could hear her ponder. She really did not see it as a problem. Flies were the way of it, normal, unremarkable; insects that just happened to be there, as did dogs, cats, mountain lions for all I know, and naturally mankind. “Why separate out the fly as a troublemaker?” she was clearly thinking. So my request to have a further cup of coffee was declined, unless I chose to pay. The consequence? I became grumpy – not generally my natural state -  paid up and walked out, at least as far as the café next door.

That was no use. Within 5 minutes of my arrival, another cup of strong, black coffee on the table before me, I had again attracted a posse of flies. One went so far as to flop onto its back right in the middle of the frothy brown liquid and struggled with an inefficient backstroke, its tiny legs kicking fruitlessly in the air. I admit to feeling ever-so-slightly sorry for it at the time.  Once at the side of the cup, I saw it shake its fly head, almost look around for a towel, clamber – well actually stagger - up the side of the cup, shake its wings and fly off. It did not return but left me so astonished, perhaps even impressed, that I felt unable to squash it. Anyway, I am fairly hopeless at killing flies, however hard I try. You have to be brought up with them, you see, and I was not.

Some years ago, in the middle of a surgical operation, a location where flies are as unwelcome as it gets, one of the beasties somehow found its way into my operating theatre. I was nowhere peculiar. It was Cambridge, if you must know, on an autumn day. You would not believe the chaos that a single fly in an operating theatre can cause. You might as well drop a nuclear bomb. Managers are summoned, nurses scream, and operating department assistants lurch this way and that in an attempt to stop the tiny horrors from going anywhere near the patient. I remember this day particularly well. There was me focussing on the operation, wound open, blood everywhere, the sort of thing surgeons do.

My assistant meanwhile had been brought up in India. “No problem,” he said. He stood there patiently, barely moving a muscle, although I could see him eyeing the fly very, very closely. His eyeballs were everywhere. And then it happened. The fly flew past, the assistant’s hand snapped out faster than a chameleon’s tongue, and the fly was his, held securely in the clenched palm of his surgically gloved hand.

“One moment, sir,” he said, his voice so soft I could barely hear him.

With that he turned on his heel, took off his outer glove - we would always wear two pairs of gloves for surgery - and handed the now inside-out glove to a passing nurse. Rapidly he donned another outer glove and within moments was back at the table side, assisting with the operation. The fly was gone.

“I learned that at school,” he declared, again in a voice verging on silent but with a tone so matter-of-fact it was clear he thought what he had done was normal. The ability to catch a fly in flight, especially during surgery, is not something I had seen before, have not seen since, and is worthy of an entry in a Book of Records. The event has certainly gone down in the annals of the hospital and will remain there for at least a century.

And the Swiss, what do they think of the little beasties? Do they worry that flies are responsible for transmitting more disease than almost any other pest on the planet? Does it really bother them that their restaurants are crawling with the things in summer? I realise there are many different types of fly but the clever bods call these ones Musca domestica (1).  Did you know they can transmit up to 65 different diseases, most likely more? How about cholera, typhoid, polio, leprosy and TB? Come to think of it, when flies are about, you are probably lucky if all you get is gut-rot.

And you don’t want to know how they really behave. Or do you? OK then, if you must then I’ll tell you. Basically, the way a fly eats is revolting. It lands from wherever it has just been, eyes up your tasty apple strudel, ice cream, donut or, in my case, coffee. Then it sets to work. The moment it lands it squidges out some saliva onto the food surface - basically it vomits - waits briefly for the saliva to liquefy the food and then sucks it up through a straw-like structure called a proboscis. Having taken its fill, on it goes to the next tasty morsel, for which you have probably paid a fortune. Land, vomit, wait, suck, land, vomit, wait, suck, and so Musca domestica continues.

It may just be me, of course, although I rather suspect not. Could it just be that I have unwittingly become the fly’s public enemy number one? Am I the topic of fly conversation out there in the scenic Swiss landscape? Good Heavens, I write these words in a Swiss café, right by a rippling water’s edge. There is a fly walking on my right hand, his best mate is having a wander across my left ankle and, damn it, a third has just tried to crawl into my left ear. I don’t believe this. Another has just walked onto my computer screen and another…I am not joking…has just landed on the letter “W” of my keyboard. Get lost all of you. I have an article to write.

And the solution? I have no idea. I guess swot ‘em if you can and swot ‘em if you can’t. After all, if you manage to squash a Musca domestica whose reflexes have come off par, he only lives for 25 days anyway. The planet will barely miss him and you will have done the Swiss a service.

1.    http://ento.psu.edu/extension/factsheets/house-flies accessed 12 August 2016