At Barmeath there was a Moss House constructed of moss-clad wood. In the 19th century it was a destination for picnics carried up in a dog-cart. When I was at Barmeath a few weeks ago I was interested to see that a new “moss house” is being put up on the site. The picture above is the view from the site but we digress.
Since 1984 there have only been two or three, depending how you count them. The first was Mrs Wing, I never dared ask if she had a Christian name. Mrs Wing came on the bus from Chelsea. She was easily irritated, especially by wet weather if she had to wait at the bus stop, and any mess in the kitchen. She once rang me in my office to ask me if she expected me to do all that washing up after she had been stood at the bus stop for twenty minutes in the rain. I was much too polite to say that actually I did. All good things come to an end and Mrs Wing retired to Bury St Edmunds.
The next was Florida and now her husband, Teddy. Florida used to bring her young children and as now the youngest has just turned twenty-one and graduated from university they must have been here for at least fifteen years. I am lucky.
However, there is always a fly in the ointment or in this case a moth. Florida and Teddy have taken both children on an extended holiday to the Philippines to see the country and visit relations. This was planned months ago and I knew that they would be away for five weeks, flying on Singapore Airlines with a stop-over in Singapore. I hope they are having a super time.
Meanwhile back here Robert spotted a moth downstairs in the sitting room that doesn’t get much used in the summer. On inspection there is an infestation which just shows what happens if cleaning is suspended for a few weeks. Robert is going for the napalm solution – a highly toxic spray that will kill every moth and probably me too. I have implemented a high-tech solution that I read about in The Spectator.
To please … clients, who don’t like the thought of actually killing any living creatures, Julia (with the help of a firm called Exosect) has come up with a subtly clever object called the ‘moth decoy’. This attracts a male moth and coats him in a powder that makes him smell like a female moth so the female moth doesn’t want to mate with him, thus breaking the breeding cycle. If you’re not so squeamish, you can buy one of her sticky moth traps alongside this, so the poor male (now ‘transgender’) moth, who smells like a female but still thinks of himself as male, will be attracted by the female pheromone in the trap and impale himself on that.
One way or another those measly moths must go.