Flytrap

          During the summer months, fruit flies hang around our kitchen. Despite my obsessive efforts to keep everything clean, still they circle slowly around, seeking out any whiff of organic matter. I suppose they do no harm, but I am unaccountably irritated by their insouciance and just cannot resist trying to squash them. Fooled by their slow flight, I grab at them with one hand, but they scoot away with super-powered acceleration. Occasionally, I catch one in a two-handed clap, but the sudden violent movement often has repercussions in the form of spillages and breakages that are even more irritating than the pesky flies. And so, I use a deadly trap, a glass containing an inch of cider vinegar, sealed at the top with clingfilm perforated with a few holes small enough for them to crawl in to but out of which, inexplicably, they are unable to escape.

          Yesterday, it being the start of October, there was a chill in the air marking the end of the fruit fly season, so I emptied the contents of the trap, a sludge of tiny, semi-pickled carcasses, down the toilet – though not without a pang of guilt. After all, the philosophy discussion group I attend has recently touched upon ahimsa, the theory of non-violence and compassion towards all living beings, as contained in Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist and several non-religious philosophies. Then, today, an item in the news tweaked my conscience even more. Scientists have produced the first wiring diagram for a whole brain – that of the fruit fly! Leaving aside, for the moment, the repercussions of this astonishing scientific breakthrough, the realisation that such tiny creatures really do have a brain (rudimentary though it may be) induces in me more sympathy with the concept of ahimsa.

          But, speaking as a person who prides himself on possessing a degree of practical skill, I do marvel at the fact that the researchers were able to slice the fly brain into 7,000 slivers in order to analyse the neural connections. Their feat of precision puts into the shade my own, recent achievement, which was the re-hanging of our internal doors so that they fit snugly into their frames after a whoosh of resistant compressing air and a reassuring ‘click’ (though my Other Half, who is congenitally disinclined to close anything fully, will never experience the sensation of satisfaction that comes over me each time I “put wood in th'ole”, as they say in Yorkshire, or thereabouts).

          But the brain of a fruit fly is commensurate with its function in life, which is to multiply and thrive, I assume. Unlike the human brain, it doesn’t create for itself problems by striving for much else. Take, for example, the paralysis my own grey matter experienced this week when a programme on my computer acted unexpectedly by renaming a file, then refusing to save it. Although my first reaction was panic, I did then attempt to analyse and rectify the process. But I failed and had to call on the expertise of James at Computerbase, who, with a few deft taps on the keyboard and a dismissive, “What’s your problem?” demeanour, soon set things right. My problem, obviously, is a lack of understanding of how the programme works. There may well be capacity in my brain to acquire that knowledge, but what’s lacking is motivation.

          One day, scientists may be able to scale up their brain-mapping technology to the human level, whereupon they will be able to fix our apparent wiring faults. Meanwhile, I would like to set them a more modest goal: to explain why fruit flies can’t find their way back through the holes in the clingfilm. And, with my much bigger brain, allied with my newly acquired compassionate streak, I really ought to be working on a non-lethal way of ridding the kitchen of the irritating little buggers.