First, a word to those of you who are my mum: you might not want to read this. The following demonstrates a level of incompetence on the part of your son which is frankly scary. We at SimonG.org take no responsibility for stress brought on by concern for the author’s mental health.

Yesterday there were still flies on the ceiling. The night before I’d counted seventeen: by now it looked more like thirty, swarming about the light fittings, and I decided enough was enough. I’d tried to be a good host, but by this point they were abusing the privilege. They had to go.

That was all very well in theory, but they didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t have the heart to kill the little chaps. No worries, I thought - one by one I’ll trap them under a glass and release them into the wild.

If you happened to look at my webcam between midnight and half past one this morning, you’d have seen me scrambling over furniture in my dressing gown in pursuit of my prey like a big game hunter, only with smaller elephants. Most of them were pretty easy to catch - they just sort of sat there as I lowered the glass over their heads - but a few were much smarter and did everything in their power to evade me. Nevertheless, I outsmarted the lot of them in the end, and was able to go to bed in a no fly zone. My original estimate of thirty turned out to be rather low - there were 82 of the wee beasties. That’s quite a lot.

I’ve had to evict enother eight today. One good thing to come out of this invasion is that it’s made me comprehend the depths to which my housekeeping has sunk. So tonight I went round putting all my rubbish in bin bags and took it outside to be collected in the morning. This involved traipsing the length of the garden several times, which in the dark and the rain meant treading on a lot of snails. So much for not wanting to kill things. By this point I was beyond caring.

After all that I decided to relax with a bath by candlelight, and very pleasant it was too. Afterwards, I climbed from the bath and blew out the three small candles, in little metal trays, that were sitting on the toilet cistern. Or, more accurately, blew them onto the floor, where they continued to burn.

So now the candles are lying on the lino, at various angles, merrily burning away, right behind the toilet where I can’t get at them. I found myself crouched naked, my head pressed hard against the porcelein of the bowl, huffing and puffing with all my might in the hope of extinguishing the flames before the house went up. All to no avail - in the end I grabbed a toothbrush, which happened to be lying nearby, and repeatedly whacked the one remaining candle in the hope of snuffing it thusly. The only effect was to catapult the burning embers out of the metal tray and onto the floor.

I put the fire out eventually. My relaxing candlelit bath had caused me so much stress that I needed a drink to calm my nerves. So I went into the kitchen, took an unopened bottle of orange juice from the fridge, filled a glass, looked away for a moment as I returned the bottle to its home, and then - on turning my gaze back to my drink - let out an audible “Mwaaaah!". There was a fly swimming in it.

It’s been one of those days really.