Written for the Sounding Off section of a local magazine
I’m from the US. In the States we have something called ‘window screens’. This technology may be new to those born and bred in the UK, so please allow me to explain it:
A window screen is a fine mesh of cross-hatched metal threads stretched taught onto a frame like a paint canvas. The effect is similar to a flattened tea strainer. It allows you to see outside with a mostly unhindered view, whilst keeping flying pests, or tea for that matter, from coming inside. There can be a mildly distracting moire effect at first, but the eye soon adapts. How often do you look outside anyway?
Stephen King has written about some of the horrors ‘outside’
I understand that fine old historic houses may have window casements which preclude easy fitment of such exotica, but not all houses were built before 1600, so the lack of this miraculous feat of engineering is somewhat perplexing to me.
It’s not just a mental health issue; it threatens to tear at the very fabric of our ‘big society’.
Imagine a group of specially invited guests sitting down to dinner. It’s a delightful, warm day, so windows have been opened to partake of the fresh air. Suddenly an uninvited guest buzzes inside. It’s threatening, loud, not a little alarming. The host opens more windows so that the creature may make an unhindered exit, but it refuses to take the hint. It circles round dinner companions who until that moment had been warming to each other’s company despite the yawning social gaps (the host has been bravely egalitarian), causing generalised anxiety then pandemonium when it is realised that one of the party may be allergic to bee stings. Is it, indeed, a bee? Nobody knows, as the little beast is maddeningly elusive, even to the trained eye. One of the guests slices angrily at the air with his fork, hoping to spear it, to no avail. The buzzing circles round and round, the consternation grows greater, and at last the host asks that the room be vacated and the door shut so that the problem may correct itself.
The party thus decamps to less salubrious surroundings, defeated, the conversation derailed for good, social relations marred, plans of peaceful dinners in the future a permanent question mark. Some time later the host quietly opens the door to see if the room has been cleared of the threat. All is calm at first. But wait, no! The fly – for that’s all it is – a tiny, perhaps even prepubescent fly has taken to the air, a one man battle-of-Britain as it were. All windows are checked to see that they are open to their widest possible aperture, but it is no use; the fly seems quite happy to make figure 8s in the air until the end of time.
Eventually the house is sold at a loss despite the bouyant market, the children are uprooted from their excellent school catchment area, local ties are cut, the hope of a lasting legacy in the village abandoned; even the beloved family pet has his previously placid existence shattered as he is forced to say goodbye to his pooch playgroup pals. All for the want of a humble window screen.