It’s been a while since I wrote in my diary, dear reader, but I’ve been thoroughly occupied with my new hobby: psychic air traffic control for flies.
When a fly comes in through the window, I use my mind to take control of him. Nothing malicious. I simply extend my mind out to catch the fly and whiz him around the room a couple of times before slingshotting him safely out of the window.
Sometimes, if it strikes me to do so, I take him right up to the window but just before letting him leave, I’ll whiz him back into the room at an unpredictably bizarre angle, give him a lap of the bathroom or something and finally pop him out into the garden.
Sometimes I might make him pause on the skin of an apple. Sometimes on the toe of my slippers. Other times, I might let him rest upon the spine of a book about Norman Lamont. But every time, I make sure he leaves unharmed through the window.
I do not mean to suggest that bluebottles or other airborne creatures – gnats or bumble bees, for instance – need an air traffic control system. I do not maintain pretensions of public service or anything like that. Our winged pals are capable of flying around in the garden with minimal assistance and their flight paths do not impact upon the correct rotation of the Earth. It is just a little hobby I have. It is a way to idly pass the hours while exercising the psychic parts of my brain.
“He’s gone bananas,” you’re thinking. But don’t worry. What I do isn’t telekinesis or anything like that. Hahaha. The very thought. What I do is more like persuasion.
The bluebottle comes in through the window. I put my book to one side, get inside his mind and when he takes an unpredictable turn, I know it is through my subtle, psychic gestures that he does so.
When I return to my own mind, all is as normal. Except that I sometimes have a craving for some turds.
At the end of our little dance, the bluebottle is returned to the garden none the wiser.
I do wonder though, if somewhere down the line, the bluebottle will wake in the dead of night after a repressed memory dream. He will have a hankering for cheese on toast, the sweet memory of holding hands with Hannah Fellows near the teeter-tots in the school playground, and the vague recollection that he may once have missed the 18:26 train to Luton after falling asleep in the station.
And then he’ll go buzzing off into the world, to fill a discarded dog turd with thousands of tiny eggs, each egg spawning a tiny baby bluebottle WITH THE FACE OF YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR.
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If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other flights of fancy.
