This year was the first time my family went back, as grown-ups, to revisit the island where we spent most of our summer vacations, twenty-five years or so ago. My sister and her husband had a baby the previous year, and in order to celebrate the fact that the family growth was now secured, our parents decided to rent a house in the rural part of the island. The north part is famous for its child friendly beaches, its many caravans- and camping places, youth binging and other festivities. Where we stayed though, there were less, or no tourists. There were mostly farmers, summer residents and ornithologists living there. On occasion a German caravan passed by, gone astray on its moose-spotting hunt.

However, renting a house during the hottest week of the summer next to a barn within reach of heaps of manure, was not part of the layout for the trip down memory lane. Everywhere there were flies, flies, flies. My dad put forth the game plan. He struck them one by one, with precision. Then he scratched his back with the swatter. The toddler was eating dead flies off the floor while my dad, my sister and I hunted and smacked flies by the numbers. For every fly we killed, two more entered the kitchen area from some kind of airshaft or hole we could not locate. We had to keep all windows and doors closed at all hours, day and night, in 35 degrees Celsius. I am usually all for giving, and to a certain degree sharing space with non-human animals, but even myself turned into a veritable murder machine in this situation. We all (or at least some of us) laughed and said this is going to be the perfect holiday, in retrospective. In the end, my dad performed his game-plan outside as well, during the evening barbecues. Mysteriously, the only thing the flies did not care for was the Gato Negro bag-in box.
It turned out to be a very liquidious and buoyant week.

Johanna