The Fly in the Car

Me and the girls were out picking blackberries with friends this week.

We’d found a lovely park, had a picnic, and then wandered off into the bushes to fill our containers.

There’s something properly meditative about blackberry picking. Reach, twist, drop. Reach, twist, drop. A real, quiet kind of relaxation, being out among it all.

As I picked, I started noticing the tiny bugs riding along on some of the berries, straight into the container with the fruit.

I found myself thinking about what I’d do with them once we got home. Vinegar or bicarbonate of soda. Which one actually works. That sort of thing.

And then another thought arrived.

We were about to drive these little bugs miles away from wherever they’d been living.

They had absolutely no idea.

Which took me, as these things do, to a thought I have more often than I’d probably like to admit.

You know when you’re driving and suddenly notice a fly has got into the car?

If you’re on the motorway, there’s not much you can do about it. So it stays there, buzzing around the window while you carry on doing forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour.

And I always think about the fly.

We could be taking it forty miles away from wherever it started.

Its patch. Its territory. Whatever a fly considers home.

When it finally gets out, does it have any idea how far it’s travelled?

Does it care that everything is suddenly unfamiliar?

Does some tiny part of it miss where it came from?

Or does a fly simply land wherever it lands and carry on as though nothing happened at all?

I don’t know.

I just think about it sometimes.

Driving down the motorway with a completely unsuspecting passenger, accidentally relocating it to an entirely different life.