Big Kev is Watching

A man with a photo-ID in a little plastic sleeve walked into our front yard this week and stopped the fellow who is laying some pavers for us (at an hourly rate) from working for a while. He wanted to demonstrate the evil of fruit flies as related to the guava tree in our garden. He was from the Department of Agriculture. He left a brochure and a card with instructions to call him.
How did they know we have a small guava tree? He was apparently driving up and down the street looking for people with fruit trees in their front gardens. Or maybe they use satellites.
The brochure warns me of huge fines if we fail to control fruit flies on our property. Since we don’t have side fences and I’m not sure about fly proof fences anyway I’m mystified as to how they’d prove that the flies came from our place rather than from next door but perhaps they have tiny radio transmitters fitted to the flies.
I had a heart attack last year. Too much gardening perhaps. I was taken to the public hospital but once they found that I had private insurance they shot me off to a private hospital where they said I would not have to wait as long for treatment. The food was better too. There was a letter waiting for me at home telling me that the NSW Department of Health had decided that I would definitely benefit from a rehabilitation program and that I would be contacted. A week or so later I got another letter admonishing me for not being in when the rehabilitation coordinator phoned to tell me when to come in to be rehabilitated. I’d gone for a walk. When I eventually went to meet her she told me a whole lot of stuff that I already knew. She suggested that I should go for regular walks. She asked me about my drinking habits. Now I considered emulating Jeffrey Bernard and saying “none of your fucking business” but why be crude so I said that I would have a few glasses of wine each evening. She told me that she would prefer it if I restricted myself to one glass. I should emphasise that this woman is not my wife or my mother. My wife would have supported the one glass rule but my dear mother certainly would have bristled at it.
Also in the mail at home was a parcel containing a bowel cancer test kit. The less said about this the better but it would appear that not being content with telling me how much I’m allowed to drink, what plants I have in my garden and what to do in my spare time the Commonwealth Government also want to peer up my bum.