'There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons.'

Coming up for Air (1939) by George Orwell.

Flies have long been a literary conceit. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport,’ says loyal Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear. And then there is Emily Dickinson’s persistently buzzing fly that stumbles toward death as she turns blue, so to speak, although most likely she is already blue of some sort if she is a bluebottle. Blue is the colour of cold hands and death: blood draining from the body. And bluebottles, as I recall from my early memories of kitchen doors and windows left open, are the colour of blue glass filtered through black and green. Tiny stained glass Diptera.

Bluebottles are signs of insanitary life. ‘Ours wasn’t a sanitary house,’ announces George Bowling, the anti-hero of Orwell’s Coming up for Air. Bluebottles feast off neglect: desultory doors ways, things left open to the hot sun. ‘All houses had insects in them. We had blackbettles in the wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range . . .’

Invading insects are part of an insanitary life, but bluebottles are not bugs, Orwell’s narrator is quick to point out. Bugs were to be found in the house where Katie Simmons lived but Katie Simmons lived among filth, on the bad street.

So did I and I remember those buzzing bluebottles. Usually they hovered around the congealing cat food where they left their tiny white pelleted gift of eggs. Enough to make any cat turn their stomach. I think those miniature flecks of eggs — perhaps dainty in another context — were the final mark of decrepitude. But squalor has its own rich atmosphere and Orwell’s sentence buzzes with a nostalgia for unsanitary surfaces and smelly bins.

The arrival of the bluebottles did herald a certain kind of summery languor I recognise: ‘The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire covers over the meat.’ This is a seasonal event, the fly equivalent of the Henley regatta. You can imagine flies donning their finery before waiting to emerge to sit on fine specimens of succulent jellied meat (a rather exalted description of my cat’s tinned cuisine). But Orwell captures something very flavoursome: unsanitary life is richly textured, those sticky surfaces of floors and larder cupboards, the greasy surface of our kitchen floor crawling with insect life: ants, bluebottles and the occasional worm. Anyone with a clean cloth and a brisk bit of Vim or disinfectant would have had a field day on our surfaces (if you could have found them; usually they were so covered with an overspill of things). But insects enjoy crevices and corners, and there were plenty of those to choose from in our house, dust-ridden pockets of dirty life.

George Bowling’s insect-memory is filled with the sound of buzzing. That buzzing sound begins in the kitchen, accompanied by the smell of bins. I am reminded of Joni Mitchell’s wonderful line to a wonderful song, ‘The hissing of summer lawns,’ which evokes the sound of jetting water bouncing off immaculately kept outdoor carpets, the well-kept lawn a clear signifier of middle class commitment to showy surfaces. Orwell’s bluebottles capture a fond nostalgia for the barely acceptable level of sanitation of his childhood home; and then a clear reminder that what came beneath the bluebottled-house in this caste system of insect-filth were the houses with bugs: the sort of house where a bluebottle was a welcome relief from the sucking of blood. The houses at the bad end of the street.

For dearest Andrew