Opinion: Is it too soon to say we’re going through plagues?

We’ve been overrun with flies in the office. House flies, I think you call them. Speedy little numbers, they were, slightly smaller than a blue bottle.

Everyone in the team was getting stressed about the situation and they were gradually becoming more tame.

The flies were getting tame, I mean, not my colleagues.

See also: Q&A: What are your rights when farmland is flooded?

About the author

Matthew Naylor

Farmers Weekly Opinion writer

Matt Naylor is managing director of Naylor Flowers, growing 300ha of cut flowers in Lincolnshire for supermarkets. He is a director of Concordia, a charity that operates the Seasonal Worker Scheme, and was one of the founders of Agrespect, an initiative to drive equality, diversity and inclusion in agriculture.

Read more articles by Matthew Naylor

My colleagues were getting wild. We would sit there trying to concentrate on our spreadsheets and then suddenly feel a fly walking down our collar or straight across our eyeball.

Enough was enough. Have you seen those battery-powered fly swats? I thought that would be the answer.

They’re like a half-sized, plastic tennis racket and you can press a button on the side to put a current through the strings. The idea is that you smack the fly and then electrocute it for good measure.

I bought one on Amazon Prime for £2.99. It arrived three minutes later. The problem with it is that you need to have reflexes like Mr Miyagi from the Karate Kid film to do any good.

I had a day on centre court giving it my best Bjorn Borg, but I only hit one fly and I think it was on its last legs anyway.

I’m sure I could hear the other flies laughing at me, and my erratic flailing around was a health and safety risk, so we had to seek an alternative control measure.

So now we have several of those blue UV lights in the office. It seems to have sorted the fly issue, but the place looks like a fish and chip shop, and the blue backlighting makes me look like a Smurf in a Teams call.

Anyway, I only say all that to avoid starting the column talking about weather. The big news is that we had 168mm of rain here in the space of four hours last week.

Our driest summer in half a century has come to an abrupt end. If you are one of those oilseed rape growers staring forlornly at your empty rain gauge, I’m sorry. I’m not telling you to boast; it has been a total nightmare for us.

Driving around looking at our fields of damaged sunflowers, I suddenly understood what’s going on. Pestilence, drought, flood, pandemic – we’ve made God angry again, haven’t we?

I get my Bible stories mixed up, but isn’t this what happened in Egypt when Jason Donovan wore that Technicolor coat of his and sang Any Dream Will Do?

Or like with Moses and the Israelites where it rained frogs and locusts? This is the 10 plagues. Think about it, he turned their rivers to blood and he has turned ours into shit.

And the plague of darkness? With electricity prices predicted to reach 70p per kwh, we’ve got a whole winter with our lights turned off.

I’m not a preacher, I leave that work to the other columnists here, but to me it feels that all these challenges have come straight out of the scriptures.

In the Bible, God wrought these plagues to tell the Pharoah that he was abusing his power and treating the people badly.

It’s a sign. If, as predicted, the Tory party chooses Liz Truss as their leader next week, I think she needs to start saying her prayers.