There comes a point every summer, usually about five minutes into the first properly warm evening, when you have to make a choice. Open the back door for a bit of air, and accept that within thirty seconds you'll be sharing the kitchen with a bluebottle the size of a small aircraft. Or keep it shut, sweat through your dinner, and wonder why you bothered moving somewhere with a garden at all.
We're a bit biased, obviously, but we think there's a third option.
A quick word about flies
The UK doesn't have it worst. We're not dealing with mosquitoes the size of sparrows or horseflies that draw blood. What we do get, in abundance, are houseflies, bluebottles, greenbottles, the occasional wasp at the end of August, and those tiny fruit flies that appear the moment a banana gets a bit tired.
None of them are dangerous, exactly. They're just rude. They land on your toast. They bump into windows with a sound out of all proportion to their size. They ignore the swatter entirely until the moment you put it down, at which point they sit calmly on the handle.
Why the usual fixes are a bit rubbish
Fly spray works, but nobody really wants to eat their dinner in a cloud of pyrethroids. Those sticky strips do the job and look absolutely grim while doing it. Electric zappers are fine if you fancy the ambience of a takeaway in 1987. Fly screens on windows are great, but a lot of effort to install.
Meanwhile, the back door stays shut. And you stay hot.
Enter the bead curtain
Bead curtains have been keeping flies out of Mediterranean kitchens for about as long as Mediterranean kitchens have existed. There's a reason every taverna you've ever been to has one clacking gently in the doorway.
The mechanism is simpler than it sounds. Flies navigate mostly by sight, using patterns of light and shadow to work out where they're going. A bead curtain breaks that up. From a fly's point of view, the doorway isn't a doorway anymore. It's a confusing wall of moving, shifting objects that it can't quite make sense of. Most flies don't bother. The ones that try usually give up.
Air, meanwhile, passes straight through. So does the cat. So do you, with a bag of shopping in each hand, which is more than can be said for most alternatives.
What to look for
Not all bead curtains are equal. Weight matters: very light plastic strings move too freely and don't really form a consistent barrier, whereas bamboo beads hang with a bit of authority and swing back into place quickly. Density matters too. A curtain with big gaps between strings is more decorative than functional. You want the strings close enough that a fly has to genuinely work at it.
Length should clear the floor by an inch or so, or brush it lightly. Too short and there's a gap at the bottom. Too long and you're forever tripping over the ends.
A small confession
We can't promise a bead curtain will stop every single fly. Nothing will. Some bluebottles have the determination of Arctic explorers, and if they really want in, they'll find a way. But for most flies, most of the time, a decent bead curtain is the difference between "open door, lovely evening" and "open door, catastrophe".
And it looks rather nice, which is more than can be said for a fly zapper.
If you'd like to leave the back door open this summer, have a look at our bamboo fly screen curtains — all handmade, dense enough to do the job, and ready to hang in a couple of minutes.