July, the month of the bluebottle, is upon us. Little banquets of road-kill birds, each a tantalising macedoine d'oiseau, festoon our country roads like feathered, bloodied footprints, writes Kevin Myers.
Though these are occasions of sadness to us, to the fly population of this world these winged-islands of death are life itself: a babbling nursery, a chuckling kindergarten, a riotous Montessori, a teeming tenement, a tumultuous university, a voluptuous marital bed, and most of all, a delicious day-long smorgesbord, where bluebottles can loll like feasting Romans, picking their teeth and then helping themselves again to something scrumptious and thrushy.
The study of the culture of bluebottles is in its infancy. For all we know, there could be bluebottle newspapers with restaurant columns giving advice on the suitability of various bird species. One columnist might declaim upon the glories of adolescent starling; another might hotly insist that nothing beats a lightly crushed hen-blackbird - though of course there's the school of thought which insists that a thrush's vocal chords alone supply the nourishment which a growing bluebottle requires.
I admit, bluebottles seem to make poor parents. You rarely see a she-bluebottle breastfeeding her young, and it is apparently the norm for a he-bluebottle to scarper after having had his way - often enough without any foreplay whatsoever, never mind any tommy-rot about safe sex. So she-bluebottles are usually left biting a bluebottle pillow, only half-way to the vital moment, with their bottoms still poised in the air, while the cad, having slaked his bluebottle lusts, has gone off to buzz around a street corner with his mates. What can a poor girl do in such circumstances? Let us draw the curtain over her chamber, until she finally emerges, the Molly Bloom of bluebottles, with a slight smile over her proboscis, but also, of course, an entire bakery of buns in her oven.
There's a maternity home for such a brood in early July, otherwise known as a bird cadaver. At other times of the year, the conscientious bluebottle mother will look for something hot and steaming left by a dog, but in high summer, she will present her youngsters with the glorious cuisine of flattened songbird, killed just as its voice was changing and it had begun to sprouts tufts of pubic plumage. Yes, indeed, a tragedy for the bird world, but good news for home-hunting young bluebottle mothers, who will turn soon turn those feathery pancakes into nice little affordable homes.
These young mums lay their eggs and then scoot, looking for yet more male bluebottles in the vain hope that the next will be better than the last. Alas, like all females before her, regardless of species, she will inevitably drain life's cup to its bitter dregs, and find - within that long, sour draught - unfailing proof of the worthlessness of the male sex. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan - and any woman who didn't quite get a literary prize - could have saved her the trouble.
But enough of philosophising about the injustices of life! For meanwhile, back in the feathery suburb that is a dead blackbird, in Number Two, Rotten Lung, a furious period of ravenous maggotry has begun, to be followed soon after by another slumberous period of pupadom. Then one morning, the perky young bluebottle emerges from its cocoon, dries its sticky limbs in the morning sun, takes a deep breath and - lo! - a brand new bluebottle takes wing.
Strangely, no one speaks well of bluebottles. Keats is silent on the subject, Shelley mute, Wordsworth wordless, worthless. Seamus Heaney writes movingly about old bones, and clay - begob, lots of clay, and marl, and bog, and turf, and sod, and soil, and maybe some more clay, and - by Jove - potato drills, oh be the hokey, potato drills galore - but never once did he write about bluebottles.
Yet what splendid subjects for poetry they are! Armour-plated protein on wings, hurtling about our kitchens like bullets in Falluja. And until one has shared a caravan with a handful of bluebottles, one hasn't lived. They dent the walls with the power of their impact, and still come back for more, cheerful grins all over their hairy, idiotic little faces. And nothing quite compares with butter that has been visited by bluebottles: their tiny footprints weaving across the yellow surface like tiny hieroglyphics, with here and there, dark black specks to remind us that nature calls for even the happy bluebottle.
For happiness is the key to the bluebottle's nature - so completely unlike his cousin, that surly, burly brute the greenbottle. One doesn't like to be racist in these matters, but no one has ever had a good word to say about greens. When Kipling wrote of "lesser breeds without the law" he was referring to greenbottles - though happily their personal habits cannot be discussed within a family newspaper. So let us agree: in matters of sexual rabidity and propulsive incontinence, bluebottles are - compared with greenbottles - the Laura Bush of the insect world.
This is a comparison which that good lady would have trouble understanding, because the New World hasn't got either bluebottles or greenbottles. So who eats road-kill birds in the US? Without bluebottles, do Americans leave that melancholy duty to their children? They probably do. Which might explain those expanding tummies, those spreading chins. No matter that those feathers are hard to chew, the beaks difficult to digest, birds nonetheless can be a nourishing - why! - even addictive fast food. Oh, American cousins! Stop blaming McDonald's for youthful obesity! Just import the humble bluebottle, and watch those colossal teenage waistlines shrink!