The Bluebottle Fly, or Calliphora vomitoria to refer to it scientifically, is, according to the Rentokil website, a scavenger attracted to dog faeces, dead animals and dustbins. It regurgitates and excretes wherever it comes to rest and thereby mechanically transmits infectious organisms. The fly is capable of passing at least sixty-five different diseases to humans, including typhoid fever, salmonella, E.coli, dysentery, tuberculosis, cholera, polio, anthrax and leprosy.
…..I’m thinking about flies because there are a lot of them about today. What are they for, exactly? I’d like to ask Charles Darwin, or the Pope, or David Attenborough, or whoever else might know. It’s not an abstract question, because it’s a hot afternoon in June, I’m walking to my neighbour Gary’s house for his annual barbecue, and it looks like I’m going to share my food with squadrons of the vile little airborne gate-crashers; if they’re going to give me some malignant tropical disease, I’d at least like to understand the role of my suffering in nature’s grand design.
…..I’ve never liked barbecues. Even the word irritates me; there’s something awkward and tasteless about the spelling to start with, and the abbreviation BBQ is downright indigestible. See what they’ve done there? They’ve shortened an ungainly eight-letter word to an even uglier, unpronounceable three-letter acronym which still has the same number of syllables. FFS.
…..When Gary invited me, I tried to think of a suitable excuse—I was going to a public autopsy, say, or volunteering in a trial of a new malaria vaccine—but I just wasn’t quick enough, so here I am, standing on Gary’s freshly-mown lawn with a warm beer in one hand and a breadstick in the other, my eyes stinging from the charcoal smoke and paraffin lighter fuel fumes, wondering if it would have been socially acceptable to turn up in a gas mask. Apparently one of the unforeseen benefits of the pandemic lockdowns in the summer of 2020 was that less people suffered food poisoning from garden barbecues. Now that would have been a good excuse: sorry Gary, I can’t come, I’m isolating.
…..‘This is the life,’ Gary says, clicking an enormous pair of stainless-steel tongs together like the jaws of some medieval torture device.
…..‘It is indeed,’ I lie. A fly—possibly one I saw on a dog turd on the way here—lands briefly on Gary’s ash-flecked beard, and he flicks it away with the tongs.
…..‘What are you cooking first?’ I ask, feigning interest. I don’t say ‘What are you cooking,’ because it’s pretty obvious: on a sagging trestle table between him and me, a vast vegetarian’s nightmare of uncooked sausages, burgers, chicken joints, steaks, pork chops, lamb kebabs, prawns and unidentifiable fish is arrayed like the meat aisle at Sainsbury’s.
…..‘Oh, I like to mix it up,’ he says. ‘Bit of everything, all at once. Variety is the spice of life, ha ha.’
Variety could be the end of life, I think, looking at six raw chicken legs rubbing shoulders with well-done sausages on their funeral pyre. It’s the sort of culinary crime which would earn any commercial food outlet an immediate closure order from the local council’s food inspectorate.
…..The mercury in the thermometer on Gary’s shed is simmering towards the thirty degrees marker, and in this weather the lunch I’d prefer would comprise a chilled gazpacho soup, a lobster salad and a lemon sorbet, chased down with a very cold bottle of Pinot Grigio. What I’m going to get instead is a sizzling hamburger, a selection of other scorched lumps of meat too hot to hold, black forest gateau and several increasingly warm bottles of lager.
…..Gary is getting into his stride now, coughing extravagantly and invisibly from somewhere inside a cloud of smoke extending into the suburban sky like the aftermath of a missile strike. He slaps various chunks of animal flesh onto the steel rack, which, incidentally, is still encrusted with the charred remains of last summer’s feast. He burns the pieces to cinders and flips them onto platters on the second trestle table on the other side of his pop-up crematorium. It’s like watching one of those industrial-scale conveyor belts that feed coal by the ton from lorries into power stations.
…..‘Come on, help yourselves. Plenty more where that came from,’ he threatens, as guests jostle politely for the least-blackened portions. I grapple with a flimsy paper plate and a plastic fork ill-designed for the task of dismantling the black blocks of random stuff loaded onto it. Quietly I long for a china plate, stainless steel cutlery, and a cloth napkin instead of a soggy square of kitchen roll.
…..All this time we are twenty feet from a fitted kitchen offering all the modern conveniences civilization has invented for the hygienic and efficient production of meals, but today the strivings of all those talented design engineers at Bosch, Breville and the like are in vain. We have regressed to a cooking method familiar to stone-age cavemen; a technique which regards fat oozing from meat into the fire below as a good source of fuel. A mode of cuisine which takes as a given that the chefs—always men, for no discernible reason—will be wearing sunglasses. Men who usually only step foot in the kitchen to sneak a can of Stella from the Smeg are suddenly promoted way beyond their expertise and expected to cook a delicious meal for twenty. Outdoors. While partly drunk.
…..Meanwhile, the fly which I thought I recognised from the pavement has invited his potentially murderous acquaintances to the party; they arrive in gangs and join the fun, hopping from uncooked flesh on the input table to burnt offerings on the output table and back again in a germ-spreading procedure whose efficacy would impress the management team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
…..After a couple of hours of this cookery carnage, battalions of black clouds march over the horizon like a liberating army.
…..‘Looks like the end of our Barbie,’ says Gary, jabbing his metal pincers at the darkening sky.
…..‘Ah, shame,’ I say, inwardly rejoicing. Barbie. That’s even worse than BBQ. Why not abbreviate it to BB?
…..‘Dessert will be served indoors,’ he announces to the guests, as heavy raindrops begin to plop onto his blood-soaked, germ-infested butcher’s apron. A genteel commotion ensues as the al fresco diners extricate themselves from deck chairs and drift towards the house.
…..‘No, no, after you.’
…..‘Blasted English weather.’
…..‘There’s a fly on your glass.’
…..‘So there is. Looks like it’s enjoying my punch.’
…..A flurry of black plastic bin liners appears from the utility room, and we battle valiantly against the sudden breeze to fill them with garbage before the coming downpour wreaks its havoc on the scene. I loiter on the lawn to enjoy the sight of the rain extinguishing the barbeque. Is it a c or a q, by the way? The q is even more objectionable than the c. It bastardises the word into a pseudo-French anomaly which ought to be pronounced barbeck, as in cheque or discotheque. But what the feck.
…..The rain pours and I head indoors, followed by a slow-moving formation of bloated flies relishing the Black Forest gateau they’ve heard about. Perhaps they’ll stop off at the cat litter tray for refreshments on the way.
…..Barbecues, I realise, are for flies.

*

[1,234 words]

Feedback from Kathryn Flett:

BARBECUES ARE FOR FLIES
My ‘edit’ in your first par (ie never use three words when one will do) leads to praise for the third, which is very funny and beautifully paced. I also love the way the writer has set up that acronym for the pay-off, too. (See also ‘what the feck’, later). Hating barbecues/barbeques/BBQs (I’m a barbeque person myself) is an amusing idea – albeit, as the child of Australian parents, one I cannot fully endorse! The pay-off is a cracking line, too.

Well done! THIRD PRIZE.