The Great Maggot Disastor of 2008
So, our council collects food leftovers weekly to take off and turn into compost. So far, so green and wonderful.
However, it turns out that if your brown compost bin has a crack in it, then flies can get in. This is BAD. It leads to maggots - lots of maggots. Thousands of maggots. More maggots, in fact, than I've ever seen in my life before. If this happens to you, the correct response is not "ew, maggots, gross, we must phone the council and get a new bin" and then foolishly leave the bin sitting on your kitchen balcony. What you should do is boil a kettle immediately and fill up the bin and let the little suckers boil and drown. Trust me on this!
Because if you don't and it happens to be a rainy cold night after several very hot days, you will discover too late that maggots don't like being cold. They want to be in a warm place. And if there's a crack in the bin that flies can get in, the maggots can also get OUT.
So it was that on Thursday night, I went to let the cat out and discovered that the balcony was absolutely writhing with maggots. Thousands of maggots. A veritable carpet of the little fuckers.
Remember how they want to be in the warm because it's cold and raining. Guess where the nearest warm place was - yep, our kitchen. What's more, if you happen to be a maggot, the old double doors to our balcony can be wriggled under quite easily. They laugh at such foolish human conventions as doors.
I was very good for about 15 minutes. I filled up buckets of hot water and sloshed maggots off the balcony down into the basement 'moat'. And then they started coming into the kitchen and I was trying to brush them up with a dustpan and I completely lost it. I had a full-blown attack of hysteria the like of which I've not experienced in quite some time and had to go and get catvincent, who calmed me down and ordered me to stay upstairs while he took care of it in a manly fashion.
I finally came downstairs after showering obsessively (there's nothing quite like Dr Brunner's Peppermint Soap for getting imaginary maggots off you) and changing clothes to find him hitting them with a hammer because he'd got bored of squishing them with bits of kitchen paper. He tried setting a few on fire but we decided that neither of us wanted to explain that one to our insurance company!
He did this for about an hour, while I researched ways to kill maggots and boiled the kettle over and over again to fill up the brown bin, which Cat had bravely moved to the driveway. We didn't want them to try for the front door as well - no one wants to fight a maggot war on two fronts. Eventually Cat couldn't stay awake any longer, so I volunteered to stay up and hold the fort. I discovered that while I couldn't bear the little pop they make if you squash them, I could manage to scoop them up with a dustpan and a bit of cardboard and plonk them in a bucket of water to drown. I'm brave that way.
Let me tell you, those little bastards are fast. They move at quite a remarkable clip for small grubs - if they ever decide to go for living flesh, we're all toast! I was particularly disturbed by their habit of throwing themselves off surfaces. They would climb the door, casually fall off it into the kitchen and then immediately start wriggling with great determination, although we never quite decided where they were trying to get to because once inside, they just whizzed around in circles until caught.
And they stink. Jesus, nothing smells like maggots, it's a rotting meat smell with edges of weird cloying sweetness. How can anything that small smell so strong? I mean, I know they don't have the best diet in the world but even in ones and twos, they reek. By the end of the night, I was getting quite blase about maggots and had no further attacks of hysteria but I never got used to the smell.
The relentless tide of maggots eventually slowed down to one or two a minute and then even less, so I was able to take much needed maggot-free tea breaks but despite repeated sluicing of the balcony with boiling water, they kept appearing. I'm not sure where from, they must have been hiding somewhere.
By 4am, I was exhausted beyond all belief and hit on the smart idea of sellotaping the doors shut on the theory that any maggots that I'd missed might get caught on the sticky tape. I was half expecting to come down and find the kitchen covered in maggots but fortunately there were only two and I suspect they were already inside but had been hiding behind the skirting board when I applied the tape (maggots are sneaky little fuckers).
4 fucking hours people, 4 hours of dealing with maggots. In the cold and rain. In the middle of the fucking night.
Still, it could have been worse - take it from me, you don't want to google 'killing maggots' and read forums about other people's experiences. Let's put it this way, the words 'maggots' and 'mattress' should not appear in the same sentence and if they do, just burn your damn house down - I'm sure the insurance company will completely understand!
However, it turns out that if your brown compost bin has a crack in it, then flies can get in. This is BAD. It leads to maggots - lots of maggots. Thousands of maggots. More maggots, in fact, than I've ever seen in my life before. If this happens to you, the correct response is not "ew, maggots, gross, we must phone the council and get a new bin" and then foolishly leave the bin sitting on your kitchen balcony. What you should do is boil a kettle immediately and fill up the bin and let the little suckers boil and drown. Trust me on this!
Because if you don't and it happens to be a rainy cold night after several very hot days, you will discover too late that maggots don't like being cold. They want to be in a warm place. And if there's a crack in the bin that flies can get in, the maggots can also get OUT.
So it was that on Thursday night, I went to let the cat out and discovered that the balcony was absolutely writhing with maggots. Thousands of maggots. A veritable carpet of the little fuckers.
Remember how they want to be in the warm because it's cold and raining. Guess where the nearest warm place was - yep, our kitchen. What's more, if you happen to be a maggot, the old double doors to our balcony can be wriggled under quite easily. They laugh at such foolish human conventions as doors.
I was very good for about 15 minutes. I filled up buckets of hot water and sloshed maggots off the balcony down into the basement 'moat'. And then they started coming into the kitchen and I was trying to brush them up with a dustpan and I completely lost it. I had a full-blown attack of hysteria the like of which I've not experienced in quite some time and had to go and get catvincent, who calmed me down and ordered me to stay upstairs while he took care of it in a manly fashion.
I finally came downstairs after showering obsessively (there's nothing quite like Dr Brunner's Peppermint Soap for getting imaginary maggots off you) and changing clothes to find him hitting them with a hammer because he'd got bored of squishing them with bits of kitchen paper. He tried setting a few on fire but we decided that neither of us wanted to explain that one to our insurance company!
He did this for about an hour, while I researched ways to kill maggots and boiled the kettle over and over again to fill up the brown bin, which Cat had bravely moved to the driveway. We didn't want them to try for the front door as well - no one wants to fight a maggot war on two fronts. Eventually Cat couldn't stay awake any longer, so I volunteered to stay up and hold the fort. I discovered that while I couldn't bear the little pop they make if you squash them, I could manage to scoop them up with a dustpan and a bit of cardboard and plonk them in a bucket of water to drown. I'm brave that way.
Let me tell you, those little bastards are fast. They move at quite a remarkable clip for small grubs - if they ever decide to go for living flesh, we're all toast! I was particularly disturbed by their habit of throwing themselves off surfaces. They would climb the door, casually fall off it into the kitchen and then immediately start wriggling with great determination, although we never quite decided where they were trying to get to because once inside, they just whizzed around in circles until caught.
And they stink. Jesus, nothing smells like maggots, it's a rotting meat smell with edges of weird cloying sweetness. How can anything that small smell so strong? I mean, I know they don't have the best diet in the world but even in ones and twos, they reek. By the end of the night, I was getting quite blase about maggots and had no further attacks of hysteria but I never got used to the smell.
The relentless tide of maggots eventually slowed down to one or two a minute and then even less, so I was able to take much needed maggot-free tea breaks but despite repeated sluicing of the balcony with boiling water, they kept appearing. I'm not sure where from, they must have been hiding somewhere.
By 4am, I was exhausted beyond all belief and hit on the smart idea of sellotaping the doors shut on the theory that any maggots that I'd missed might get caught on the sticky tape. I was half expecting to come down and find the kitchen covered in maggots but fortunately there were only two and I suspect they were already inside but had been hiding behind the skirting board when I applied the tape (maggots are sneaky little fuckers).
4 fucking hours people, 4 hours of dealing with maggots. In the cold and rain. In the middle of the fucking night.
Still, it could have been worse - take it from me, you don't want to google 'killing maggots' and read forums about other people's experiences. Let's put it this way, the words 'maggots' and 'mattress' should not appear in the same sentence and if they do, just burn your damn house down - I'm sure the insurance company will completely understand!