More the same kind of stuff as seen in http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopic.php?t=13060

Fly Swatting

Whit Monday, for so many just anther excuse to litter areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty with paper bags, holds a deeper and more moving significance for the sporting man. If you look in your diary towards the end of May, you will see the entry: “Whit Monday. Fly Swatting begins. Such simple words, but what powerful emotions they conjure up – what roseate remembrances of past runs, what hopeful dreams of hunts to come!

English literature is full of allusions to that king of sports. Every schoolboy knows the rhyme of Coleridge’s:

He is the ancient mariner,

He swatteth one in three.

Some have taken this to be a slur on the efficiency of the British Merchant Navy, but I feel sure that Coleridge did not have this interpretation in mind. Note the word “ancient”. He is the ancient mariner. Despite his age, the clean, healthy life of the sea has left him with a suppleness of limb and keenness of eye that has left him able to bag a third of all his flies, a record of which a younger man would be proud.

It is Chaucer who is responsible for the old saw:

When noone is highe,

Then swatte ye flyee.

This has lead some to believe that the correct time for swatting is after lunch, but there are those who disagree. The group to which I belong holds that the best time is, in fact, immediately after breakfast. It stands to reason that a fly who has just awoken and taken a cold plunge in the milk jug is far more likely to be in A1 mettle for the Chase than a fly who has spent the morning gorging on jam and the remains of the roast, and wants nothing more than to have a quiet nap on the ceiling.

The hunt to which I belong, therefore, meets immediately after breakfast in the library of Lord Snettersham-Snettersham’s country residence, clutching our weapons. Old Admiral Budlyear carries his copy of last weekend’s Telegraph, complete with the inserts, whilst young Freddie Temple wields the lighter and more flexible Daily Mail. There is a certain amount of laughing and chaffing at a new member of the hunt who has brought along a patent-wire fly swat, for such things are totally contrary to the etiquette of the game. A true sportsman would as soon as shoot a sitting bird.

The butler, Slingsby, is now shown in, and takes up his post by the open window. He was hired for the purposes of fly-luring, on account of his brilliantly bald head, which no fly has yet been known to resist. The doors are shut, and we settle down to wait. After a few minutes of tense silence, one of the newer members, who has not yet acquired the cast-iron self-control that we pride ourselves on, gives a gasp of delight. A fine bull-fly is peering in. This is the moment of truth. Will the fly enter in, drawn by the glow of Slingsby’s scalp, or will he return to have another proboscis-full of the dead rat down in the potting shed? The decision is made. The fly swoops through the window and perches on Slingsby’s gleaming cupola. Simultaneously, Francis the footman slams the window shut, and the fly rockets to the ceiling.

“Gone away, sir, thank you, sir,” says Slingsby respectfully, and with a crashing “Yoicks!” and “Tally Ho!” the hunt is on.

Ah, sweet mystery of life! How many wonderful old runs that library has seen. I remember once a tough old dog-fly leading us without a check from ten in the morning till about five minutes before lunch. We found on Slingsby’s head, and from there made a line across country to the south window. There was a sticky bit of work on the panes, but he escaped and led us over to the bookshelves. Bertie Whitherstrom took a frightful toss over a whatnot, and old General Griggs, who is not as keen sighted as he used to be, came to grief on a sunken post-modernistic décor footstool. By the end of a couple of hours only “Binks” Bodger and myself were on the active list. All the rest were nursing bruised shins and ankles in the background. At a quarter to one the fly doubled back from a magnificent Corot, and in trying to intercept him there poor Binks fell foul of the head of a bearskin rug and had to retire.

A few minutes later I had the good fortune to come up with the brute as he rested on the portrait of our host’s grandmother near the fireplace. I was using a bedroom slipper that day, and damaged the portrait beyond repair, upping (I feel) the average quality of the room no small amount. My host unfortunately did not feel the same way, but I have my consolation in the slipper that hands over my mantelpiece, and the memory of one of the finest runs a swatter ever had.

There are some who claim that fly-swatting is inferior as a sport to the wasping of the English countryside. As one who has had a wide experience of both, I must emphatically deny this. Wasping is all very well in its own way, but to try to compare the two is foolish. Waspers point to the element of danger in their favourite pursuit, some going so far as to say that it really ought to come under the head of big game hunting, but I have always maintained that the danger is more imaginary than real. Wasps are not swift thinkers – they do not connect cause and effect. A wasp rarely has the intelligence to realise that the man in the room is responsible for his troubles, and almost never attacks him. And, even admitting that a wasp has a sting, which gives the novice a thrill, who has ever heard of anyone barking his shin on a chair during a wasp hunt?

Wasping is too sedentary for me. You wait till the creature is sitting waist-high in the jam and then shove him under with a teaspoon. Is this a sport in the sense that fly-swatting is a sport? I think not. The excitement of the chase is practically non-existent. Give me a cracking two-hour run with a fly with plenty of jumps to take, including a grand piano and an assortment of gate-leg tables.

That is the life.