It’s obviously summer, there are bugs in my wine
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:11 pm by jamesI remember a creperie we used frequent in the summertime that seemed to have a resident swarm of wasps. It was a slightly scary novelty – not quite a right of passage into summer, but perhaps something that proved to us that this actually was summer. We used to capture them under glasses and move the jam to other tables to draw them off.
We were a little unprepared for summertime in Africa. Within days of arriving I wrote this post and now recognise the onset of spring by the seeming impossibility of keeping small bugs out of my glass of wine. As the warmer seasons progress the tiny wine bugs progress to enormous great flies that sound like the doodlebugs in my Grandma’s stories of the Blitz and make me duck involuntarily. The best thing for them is a stinky-red-top-trap hung outside. I topped ours up last week and the drone of flies inside the trap awaiting certain death by drowning or old age was like a herd of lawnmowers. I feel rocks.