Lord of the flies

Colindale, London, England // 6.15 pm // Mostly cloudy 12ºc / 54ºf

Quite a bit of time has passed since the last written blog. Not a huge amount has happened in that time either. Actually, I think I recorded a video blog, but somehow it disappeared into the innards of Youtube.

Bank Holiday Weekend at the start of the month was no such thing for me, as always. One day I might work in a job that honours a normal working clock and bank holidays along with everyone else in the universe. Still, the weather was nice and we had visitors in the form of Elle's sister and her boyfriend. As we tend to do with guests, we did the tourist thing around London: Westminster, Trafalgar Square, South Bank, Canary Wharf, Covent Garden etc etc. On Sunday we went to one of Elle's friends in Ealing for a BBQ, although I had to leave after an hour thanks to a 4am start on "Bank Holiday Monday".

The next installment of the pub crawl took place after work on Monday, with one of my colleagues joining me for the first few stops. I managed to finish off the Bakerloo line quest, and start on the Central line.

Two of the main things on my mind in the last week or so have been insects and football.

On Saturday, my friend Stu came round to watch the ever-important Celtic v Rangers match, which was deeemd to have the power to decide who wins the league. Stu left around 3pm. It was a nice day outside, and I had assumed Elle had opened the kitchen window at some point and it flew in. But I asked her, and she hadn't. Strange, I thought. A few hours later, another appeared. Hmm. Coincidence, probably.

Three more appeared later in the evening, and I started to question if we had a problem.

Saturday night, Elle and I with our friends Stu and Jenn went to our local for karaoke. I was feeling particularly daring and only sang songs that I had never done before, including Mike & The Mechanics with Over My Shoulder.

On Sunday afternoon, the first bluebottle of the day appears - before then, I had completely forgot about the day before. And another. And another. And a few more. Then I started getting worried, as did Elle. At this point, I was managing to let them out of the window one by one.

Later, Elle and I went to the Barnet Council dump to drop off my old PC monitor (got a nice sexy flatscreen LCD one now) and to Asda to get ingredients for the dinner I was cooking later. Two hours later, we returned. I had thought about and worried about the bluebottle situation all the time we were out. I was right to do so; I stepped into the kitchen to find the horrific sight of 21 bluebottles all flying around the vicinity of the window. Thankfully, I was armed with a can of Raid! which I had just bought at Asda, and proceeded to wipe the bastards out with the stuff. I don't know exactly what this stuff does, but I do know that it *really* fucks them over. It's actually quite an amazing sight to see 21 large bluebottles all fall from the sky pretty much simultaneously a few seconds after spraying this stuff. 10 minutes later, when they had all buzzed their last buzz, I was able to count them. By the end of the day, I had spotted and got rid of 49 of the cretins.

Needless to say, I wasn't going to be able to deal with this for much longer, and got the landlord on the case. I also emailed my boss to warn her that I might need to take Tuesday off work (Monday was already a day off) to keep on top of the situation. Good job I did, as Tuesday was the only day the pest control guys could come out. But on Monday, encouragingly, only 6 of the things appeared. On Tuesday, 5, but the pest control guy found nothing. It's probably a good time to explain what I think the cause of the infestation was.

For the last few months, we've had two nests of birds in the loft space above our flat - one above the living room window, and one above the kitchen window. Around the same time as all this shite happened, I realised I hadn't heard the family of birds above the kitchen for a while. They had flown the nest for some reason. Presumably because one of the birds kicked the bucket. Dead bird = rotting corpse = maggots = bluebottles.

But as I said, nothing was found. However, the guy admitted he couldn't access the portion of loft space that I assumed the birds had been living in due to the construction of the roof. A good thing is we found out our loft actually had a complete floor, and we're contemplating what to do with this space.

Thankfully, the following three days - including today - bore no new bluebottles, so I can now assume that the problem has past, the corpse has rotted, and the bastards are gone. Until the next time.

And amongst all that excitement, the Scottish Premier League has also reached a really exciting phase. However, it started with Rangers beating us last weekend, which meant that they were now in control of the SPL, and their own destiny. We kept up the fight by managing a win on Tuesday, and amazingly Rangers screwed up on Wednesday by drawing against Hibs, putting Celtic back on top and back in control, albeit only 2 goals ahead. It's turning out to be one of the closest title races for years, but I have horrible memories of four seasons ago, and the last game of the season against Motherwell, and losing the league by one single goal!

So there are two more games to go. And the Rangers games are just as important as the Celtic games for me now. Rangers play tomorrow, Celtic on Sunday, then we both play at the same time next Sunday for the last game of the season, which will decide the title. I'm really hoping we can do it.