Hooray!

OMG! Finally, I've found the source! For the last few weeks I have had a black bug problem in my kitchen. Little, tiny, black, what I would have called, fruit bugs have been flying around in my kitchen. They have swarmed out of the rubbish bin when I have thrown the used coffee granules out of the coffee pot in there in the mornings, like a miniature swam of locusts.

Ah! I'd jump, with my sleepy eyes and my half-switched on brain. Then I'd go mad with the fly spray (and I hate fly spray. If I'm spraying the stuff around you know the situation is dire) until I could taste the poison on my lips, as I sat outside having my morning fag waiting for the toxic cloud to dissipate. I was sure I was poisoning all and sundry, shortening our lives by years, but the bugs kept coming, like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust. It was starting to get me down, as stupid as that may sound. Nothing seemed to be stopping them. I was starting to think that I'd have to call in the exterminator, move out, set fire to the place.

Well, anyway, yesterday afternoon I sat out on my back veranda and finished Tim Winton's Breath, which I would recommend and I felt so uplifted by it – as I often do after finishing a novel – that I got busy and cleaned up around the place. You know, busy, busy, feeling good, it was bin night lets sweep away the rubble and make the place shiny and new.

In my pantry we have had a carton of beer in which was some light beer, the last six pack to be precise, sitting on the floor next to the bin. But, being light beer, in a house of vodka drinkers, nobody was in a rush to drink the last of it. It seemed that a collection of super market bags had tumbled in filling the box. I pulled out the supermarket bags to find underneath a bag of something indescribable. Black, slimy goop, like a rotting foetus turned to liquid, which I’m sure was once one of the vegetable varieties, out of which flew the main colony of small, black bugs. As I stood with it in my hand the bugs began to swarm up my arm, like a long evening glove, just as the putrid smell made its way to my nostrils. I had to run for the bin, I have a very sensitive stomach to rancid smells. OMG!

Anyway, there was no swarm of black bugs this morning as I tossed the used coffee granules. No bugs buzzing around the sink. No cloud of them in the air. Yay! We’re not filthy, putrid bag ladies after all.