Amityville Kitchen

My super-galactic travelling friends,

This year seems to have been a bumper crop for flies, and mixed with the fact it's been so hot (which I'm guessing is the reason for all the flies) we've had to have windows open, and it's been horrible! Every time a door or a window is opened, flies have somehow managed to find their way in (although I have a theory about flies and quantum tunnelling, but that's for another time...)

I try and keep windows open as little as possible because of this, while my partner likes to keep all the windows and back door wide open as often as possible. All these reasons above meant that, when I discovered above average amount of flies on our kitchen windows one afternoon, I just assumed they came in the day before, and so went about shooing them out...I soon realised though that I was horribly wrong, and the flies were actually coming

from inside the house!!!

I quickly came to this horrifying conclusion when, the next time I went downstairs I ended up throwing out twelve or so flies, which were all lazily hanging out on the windows behind our blinds. Thankfully this made it easier to get rid of them...not easy, because they insisted on buzzing up down left and right on the windows, basically anywhere but out, but it was still easily than if they'd been flying around the kitchen.

After that every few hours I popped downstairs to shoo out three or four at a time, while trying to direct any others not on the windows to the two spiders we have in the kitchen/dining room area. I'm not a fan of spiders being inside, but these little guys helped me out so much with the flies. The only downside being that once they were done with the flies they would drop them onto the surface below. Thankfully those surfaces were the corner of our windowsills, and so were far away from food prep, utensils, cooking areas etc, so I could just hoover them up and wipe it down when needed without worrying they would cause any issues with food...still nasty though!

We keep a clean kitchen, so I was confused where they were coming from. We searched everywhere for some dropped meat, or something that had maybe died, and we put out bins outside in case there were coming from something inside one of those, but they still kept coming. Neither of us smelt or found anything, so we still have no idea where they came from.

Eventually though their numbers began to decreased, only needing to get rid of one or two, and by Thursday evening the horror was over.

Having a sudden influx of flies INSIDE OUR HOUSE is one of my nightmare scenarios, so I'm glad that, one, there weren't as many as there could have been, two, they weren't buzzing all over the place taking over other rooms, and three, we weren't away when it happened, because the idea of coming back home after a weekend away to find dozens of flies in the kitchen makes me feel rather queasy...

So that was the week that our kitchen turned into a milder version of that one scene from The Amityville Horror. Now I have to keep my fingers crossed that I don't come downstairs one morning to find our kitchen walls bleeding...