Bah.

[ewt]

Every year I say this, and every year I don't do anything about it...

Why does this God-forsaken country NOT HAVE FLYSCREENS on the windows? What is WRONG with your architects/designers/whoever makes these decisions? What the FUCKING FUCK? It isn't hard. Really. I know you don't have very many nasty bitey mosquitoes, I know the spiders are not poisonous, but surely it's an advantage to be able to sit inside in the evening, reading, with the window open, without having umpteen suicidal moths blunder in and fry themselves on your reading lamp? Surely it's a good thing to be able to cook without attracting every fly for 4 blocks around? We have the technology, folks.

I'm not quite at the point of nailing mesh fabric to the window frames but I'm getting pretty damned close. I think next time I have any spare cash (yeah, right!) I might be making a trip to a hardware store to at least find out what my options are.

It's the little things...

Comments

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

*grin*

Don't forget the Daddy long legs, too! (You know the things I mean? Look like giant mosquitos?)

In my experience, continental Europe's the same on the lack-of-flyscreen front, too.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Yes, we get the giant fake mosquitoes in the autumn. They are harmless but creepy.

[arosoff.livejournal.com]

heh. it got me too. But from what I've heard, insects have only been a problem relatively recently as the weather's got warmer. I still get amused at Brits in America who don't know about mozzies and blackflies and no-see-ums, and get bitten alive. :)

Now, a bigger issue: British houses with 2 dozen windows, only 3 of which open. I know that in victorian times they did this because of the air--you wanted to let in as much light as possible but as few fumes. But why, for the love of God, do they STILL DO IT?! Windows should OPEN! Breezes are GOOD!

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I grew up associating mosquitoes with foreign parts; their range doesn't (or didn't) extend up to my native Newcastle. It was a shock to go to university in Cambridge and find mosquitoes in England!

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

At least when my parents redid their windows, it was because the opening ones cost significantly more.

[cosmolinguist]

I think, at least in Manchester, they don't expect anyone to need to open the windows. :-)

And, in a flat that's the ground floor of a house, you can't open most of the windows.

And we still had a wasp fly in the kitchen yesterday.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

That's what net curtains used to be for! Admittedly they were not entirely effective. Also, people used to smoke more, and wear clothes in bed, both of which make you get less bitten.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Net curtains are nearly useless compared to proper flyscreens, in my experience.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I think today's net curtains are a sad vestige of a formerly useful item, like shoes, clothes and ice cream.

[phelyan.livejournal.com]

Smoking doesn't help much, either. Trust me on that.

[karen2205]

*nods* - this is one of the things I will fix when I build my own house. I want fly screens and proper outdoor shutters (for letting light in, but keeping the heat out), maybe awnings and double glazing. I don't know quite how you order that stuff in a hole in the wall so that each thing operates individually, but I intend to find out!

[vashti.livejournal.com]

One year, we built one - it was a wooden frame that fit inside the window frame, with wire mesh nailed to it.

This was after we were up all night because a THING, which was like a daddy-longlegs except orange with a very visible sting, flew into our bedroom. And. kept. landing. on. me.

To this day I still have no idea what it was. And I've never seen another one. Perhaps it was the spirit of not having adequate mozzie nets.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

This is why one has cats.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You have cats! Nile told me in the pub. I did not know this! Catcatcat! Tell me about your cats!

I could also just go and look at you and Ali's Livejournals like a sensible person too.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

We've not really talked about them much (or anything else, for that matter). We have two brothers from the same litter, Cleo (http://montag.anarres.org/pictures/2007/03/15/large/img_2292.jpg) and Zet (http://montag.anarres.org/pictures/2007/03/15/large/img_2300-2.jpg) (don't blame us for the names, nor the gender confusion - there was a mistaken vet in Cleo's past!). They are roughly 13 months old at this point, and we've had them for about 8 weeks now (their previous owners emmigrated to South Africa). They have settled in reasonably well, and are slowly being introduced to the neighbourhood litter tray our garden. They are not the most social of creatures, but Zet has figured out that if he touches his nose to ours once dawn has broken, then he gets fed!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

LOLLY! Zet looks just like Lolly! KITTINS YAY. Aw, wuv. CATS!

/exit ridiculous baby talk in vicinty of cats mode

[pfy.livejournal.com]

You are aware of xkcd #231 (http://www.xkcd.com/c231.html), right?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Heheheheh. It's so true. Though cats are good for physics because they are like electrons.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

Though cats are good for physics because they are like electrons.

Sometimes they act like a particle, sometimes they act like a wave?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes! And they diffract through small gaps, like doors that are about to be closed, legs stopping them getting out/to the pedals of cars and cat baskets that you thought were secure. And two cats are sometimes faster than one if they form a Cooper pair and one tries to steal the chicken on the worksurface while the other one makes for the door they should not go through. And sometimes you leave one upstairs asleep on a bed but when you get downstairs it has quantum tunnelled through the floor and is sitting in front of the food bowl with an expectant look on its face.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I was thinking of the diffraction bit too :-)

Also, when you're trying to walk, cats orbit your feet in a kind of probability field, or region of high cat-density (the cat can be at any distance in any direction from your feet, due to the uncertainty principle, but moving your leg will measure the position of the cat, thereby confirming its location as 'underfoot'). The more cats you add, the more convoluted in shape the orbitals become.

Cats always prefer to occupy the lowest-energy state. A cat may be found in any possible orbital, but if all the lower-energy orbitals are not completely filled, this configuration will not be stable. The cat will eventually lose energy by emitting hair, and drop into the lower orbital.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Where the higher energy orbital is somebody's bed, or the sofa, and lower energy orbital is on the floor over where the hot water pipes go.

[pfy.livejournal.com]

And laps. I have experimentally confirmed that cats bind very strongly to laps. Often with all ten claws.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

From your descriptions of Lolly, I suspect Zet is about half his size.

[mubeimmik.livejournal.com]

We don't have screens here either, which leads to worrying about cats flying off the 8th floor and hot nights because you'd rather be hot than eaten by mosquitoes! We intend on making some screens for the windows soon... the sliding door is another monster but we're going to work on it too!

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

There are companies selling them over here, we've one on the backdoor and its heaven-sent, and one on the kitchen window which already came in useful the other night when the Worlds Largest DaddyLongLegs came to visit. Of course, one has to remember to actually put the damn thing up on that window, which we hadnlt, until aforementioned visitor turned up *shudder*

[redcountess]

I would dearly love to have a screen door on the back door to let the breeze in (coming from Australia where such things are the norm), but we are only renting.

[lineoutrecords.livejournal.com]

Every year I get pissed off with the insect invasion, yet it has never occured to me to try and get flyscreens. Now that you've caused me to consider this option I will now get annoyed that I can't have one ;)

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

Bah! ;)

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

I have no freakin' idea! But after getting used to them in Canada, I can see the sense of it.

I think the reason is that it used to be a lot cooler here weather-wise, and people slept with the windows closed most of the time.

[crankles.livejournal.com]

Er ... wait, you mean that windows don't have screens in England? Is there some kind of logic behind this?

Dave once lived in a place with no screens (it was kind of a slum) and we really did nail mesh to the window, particularly because we were in a bad neighborhood where people on the sidewalk could reach into our kitchen easily. I say go for it!

[dyfferent.livejournal.com]

the windows in our flat open out and up, which means you would have to open the window, then fit in the thing with the screen on, and reverse the process when closing, which is going to be a pain in the ass.

But last time we went to the USA we bought half a bolt of fiberglass windowscreening, folded it up and brought it home, so we do intend to do something with it this year before it gets really hot.

[fwuffydragon.livejournal.com]

Fly screens are wonderful things. Haven't felt the need to have them here in the UK yet, but if you live in a damp area where there are lots of mozzies around or in a place that gets stuffy then they are an absolute godsend.

You can make light wooden frames with mesh over them that you can stick to the sides of the window with sticky velcro so they can be taken on and off easily...

[poetpaladin.livejournal.com]

I read once about British road crews having to repair their roads because the temperatures were getting high than expected over the summers of the past few years.

I realized the temperatures were average for Southern California, and that our roads didn't need annual re-tarring.

[redcountess]

I think it's to do with radiant heat - I don't know about the rest of the UK, but London is on clay and so it stores heat (it's usually a few degrees warmer than the surrounding counties too despite being on a river)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Wait...British road crews, repair the roads? Don't be silly. They put up cones, stand around for two weeks, pour some perfunctory tarmac on the surface to hide the destruction and then bugger off. That's why the roads have been continuously falling apart and full of potholes for the last 30 years.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually noticed many potholes here compared to some parts of Canada. Okay, I don't drive, but I didn't drive there either. The "lumps of water under the ground make ice and break up the pavement and then in spring it melts and goes away" really does make holes the size of pots. Some of them are quite large pots, the sort you might have if you were trying to feed 50 people, and can't lift when they are full.

I imagine it's the sort of thing that varies considerably from council to council, though; as London is warmer and I spend most of my time here, I wouldn't likely see as much of the wear-and-tear caused by cold weather. I'd far rather my council spent money on setting up new cycle paths and pedestrian areas than on maintaining existing roads, which all seem to be in pretty good shape.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If you ever come to visit Cambridge I will have to show you. There are patch-holes about that size around the corner from me where the Co-op delivery lorry parks and nobody has fixed it; there is a hole that goes from the bridge I cycle across every day through to the river, and it is getting bigger, and nobody has fixed it. The way I used to get to my department, along the riverside, has enormous craters in it and (worse) steps the size of kerbs in the middle of the road, parallel to the direction of travel, otherwise known as cyclist killers. Once a whole enormous sewer inspection hatch, like the size of a front door, fell apart and they just put a few cones round it and left it like that, for two months.

[poggle.livejournal.com]

last year I cut some net curtains and just stuck them to the plastic window frame with masking tape. (the one window I kept open in the front room) It worked but the sticky tape is still stuck to the window frame. :(

[sci.livejournal.com]

I fear the answers very simple, if Canada's like the USA flyscreens. American windows tend to be the sliding type (horizontal or vertical), whereas in the UK the majority of opening windows open like doors. Putting net around the outside of them is then impossible without making big net-cages to encompas the arc of the opening window. They could be put on the inside instead, but then would block access to the handles for said windows.

Least, that's what I figured.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

In Canada I've lived in houses with sliding sash windows that had screens, more modern sliding windows that had screens, and windows that open outward like doors... and had screens. In the latter case, if the window is designed to have a screen it's not that difficult to change the opening mechanism so that instead of reading and pushing the window out, you wind the handle around and around - a bit like old car-doors - and that pushes the window out. The screen goes on the inside of the window, and can be removed easily for window cleaning.

Seriously, this isn't down to an impossibility of engineering.

Sash windows and sliding windows the screen is on the outside. One house I lived in had old wooden sash windows and in the summer we'd put screens on, in the winter we'd exchange that for a pane of glass to make double-glazing.

[elmyra.livejournal.com]

Hm, yeah, we used to have them in Bulgaria. Haven't really missed them much - there are about two days a year in this country when you can actually sit around with the windows open. ;-)

[velvetpurrs.livejournal.com]

I'd quite like fly screens on the windows (hate buzzing flying things at night) but since it would mean putting them up/down/up/down all the time as I open/close windows (I work from home quite a bit but am often out/in/out at short notice) I went for a different solution.

I learn to tolerate flying things, those that pester get flysprayed (with a less toxic one) or swatted. If mosquitos are too bad (I've had to deal with them for the last 10 years or so, much to most people's disbelief since I'm in england) then they are generally only overnight, and so I use a mossie net over the bed.

This is also useful for hiding under when there are moths and daddy long legs careering around the room at night.

The mozzie net does need careful inspection before climbing inside though, as I have found a MASSIVE house spider on/in it twice now, and have ABSOLUTELY no wish to be trapped *inside* a net with one of those (and, if I'm honest, I do NOT want it crawling around on the outside while I'm inside either, Just In Case...).

Ikea have good cheap mozzie nets, but I imagine you could make your own fairly easily with net with small enough holes in, copious amounts of said net, bamboo poles (mine is round, but I see no reason why square wouldn't work with the poles lashed together at the corners) and some ribbon to tie the net onto the bamboo, and also to suspend bamboo from ceiling.

[keira-online.livejournal.com]

I willl be getting screens for my house, both for windows and the back door (and either a screeen for my bedroom door or a mozy net for the bed so I have one isolation room).
Can post the links for the companies if you want.

Not really bothered about moths or mosiqutos tbh, more the embarassement of having to ask the neighbours round every time a wasp gets in.