Clue 1: Deuteronomy 23: 12-14  (a rather nice translation this one, but not from King James' Bible):

12 Thou shalt have a place without thy tents, to which thou shalt go to do the necessities of nature.
13 Carying a spade staffe in thy hand, and when thou wilt ease thee, thou shalt cut a round turfe, and thou shalt cover thy excrements therewith, in the place where thou didst ease thy selfe.
14 For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy tents to deliver thee, and to give thy enemies into thy hands, that thy tents may be holy, and that there appeare no filthinesse in them, lest he forsake thee.

I must admit that I have never envisioned the Almighty as a particulary strict Environmental Health Officer before, but Deuteronomy does suggests that that is one of His functions. I shall go and clean the loo at once, making sure I squirt lots of Domestos Grotbuster everywhere. 

Then bury the Grotbuster under some round turf. You don't want to take any chances - he is a vengeful god, I hear, and if he's watching your loo you'd best just do what he says.

The loo installed in Richmond was a farcical affair - the lad who put it in was a relative of the queen and trying to get into her good books so he threw himself into the project with great enthusiasm. However he was no plumber and definitely a bit weak on basic engineering principles. He was trying to emulate one he'd seen in Tuscany but failed to notice that the one there was benefiting from its juxtaposition to the water source and that gravity was doing the refill. In Richmond the water had to be drawn from a well and then pumped to the cistern, meaning that one needed to give the pumpers a fair amount of notice prior to flushing. It is claimed she did use it, which is plausible, and that it is the first ever water closet, which is simply stupid.

It also had to be emptied after every flush by physically carrying the collected waste water and its contents out to be dumped - an arduous task and one that the chambermaids must have loathed with as much malice as they reserved for Harington, the "inventor".

You are rather hard on Sir John Harington, nordmann. He sounds as though he was great fun (Ajax and all that) and his own loo at the Manor House, Kelston, was much admired (I think). The Queen (Harington's godmother) saw it there when she visited Somerset, and she was so impressed that she asked Harington to install one for her at Richmond. But she complained it was too noisy, so she didn't use it much. So the fly on the wall would have witnessed the first flushing away of an English royal stool. But the royal loo itself was the second to be installed in England. I'm sure there were lots of other water closets before this (didn't the Chinese have them?), but, as ever, the English get the credit for something that was not really their idea.

Here is a diagram of how it worked:




PS I like the fish (I think they are fish).

PPS The translation from Deuteronomy was also by Harington. He was a clever lad.

PPPS I suppose if we read the Bible literally, as sadly we are so often urged to do these days, then God's loo rules as given in Deuteronomy apply only when camping; I am assuming that "tent" is not a mistranslation for "dwelling place", but means "tent", as in canvas.

Forgot - your go to redirect the fly, nordmann.

The fly settles on a wall in a small room whose window overlooks Praed Street, near Paddington Station in London. It is the morning of September 3rd, 1928, and a solitary figure enters the room, hangs his jacket and walks to the corner. At first he expresses dismay at what he finds in the corner, but then slowly the disappointment turns at first to curiosity, and then undisguised delight. Excitedly he rushes out of the room again. The world would never be the same again.

Are we back with a Grotbuster but of a rather different sort being apparently of itself somewhat grotty but which it became clear to its discoverer would also 'Kill germs dead'? (I've never worked out what else germs could be killed other than dead.)

Am I being overly cryptic with my answer again? Or am I just wrong and it's not Fleming and his grotty looking Petri dish.

It's Fleming alright. No flies on you! Well, actually ...

Sorry, I forgot about this so here’s an easy one.
 

It’s February 1858 and the time travelling fly is somewhat tired as it lands on the wall of a steamy room in Sarawak. A man is busily writing then finishes and puts the paper in an envelope and wonders how long it will be before he gets a response. Little did he realise that what he had written would be in the public domain before he did nor that the final consequences would shape so much of the future.

Is that Alfred Wallace writing to someone in England (Charles Darwin or someone else at the Royal Society) on the subject of natural selection?

Yes indeedy, Viz, he's dashing off the 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type' paper which Darwin gave to Lyell and who presented it to the Linnean Society.

Despatch the fly.

I luckily knew that one ferval because I saw Bill Bailey's fascinating documentary about the Wallace Line a few months back.

Okay - the fly heads out of the tropics and north to the Aegean Sea, to Rhodes, and the rooftop garden of a house there, 22 September 146 BC, evening.

Well, 22 Sep suggests equinox, and Rhodes BC, a Greek who - as they did - made some shrewd obsevations and came up with a theory. I admit to doing a search and found Hippochoros. That may all be way off target; so is there a theory of coincidences too?

That's it Priscilla. 

The Greek astronomer Hipparchus (who had studied at Alexandria) calculated the equinoctal point that year. 146 BC was also an eventful year in terms of international affairs as it was the year when Rome finally defeated both Carthage and Corinth meaning that the new Roman empire was established in North Africa and Greece.

The fly is with you.

Good grief! I'm right? Sorry I spelled his name wrong...... mine spelling of it in translation means Noisy Horse, I think. I did him an injustice. Now I've got to do one? Mm.

March, 1340 and a birthing bed in a well appointed room in Ghent - well not over a butcher's  shop, anway. The fly on the wall (NOT from the butcher's shop, either) buzzes advice in the new-born's ear.
        'Set aside yer claim. Take the money, lad, take the money.'
Well-heeded advice. The gospel according to St Googled Wikki says the lad became no 16 in the list of the wealthiest people ever. £50 billion at today's rates.

Do I have to give hint if there is no response? I am not quite clued in to this sort of stuff. Could have been an anti-Spanish fly - well, Castille at that time, as it happened.

John of Gaunt (Ghent)?

And I haven't cheated!

Of course not. I only put it up for you, really. What a great medievil soap suject J of G could be; "I, John, me wives, mistresses, Royal links and me scribbling bruvver in law.
Er, Temps -who was it who confiscated that huge inherited pile?

The fly in the ointment is all yours.

It was that silly Richard II, Priscilla.

Is it time to swat the fly yet?

A darkened room in a very ordinary house near the west end of Straight Street. A Roman citizen, far from home, is recovering from a transient ischaemic attack. Exact date not known, but probably around 34-36 A.D.

The man does recover and, for better or for worse, the world will never be quite the same again.

I have been taken to task here for saying the man had suffered a transient ischaemic attack. No one knew -  or knows - for sure what had happened. But his reported symptoms strongly indicate such an episode.

He certainly had been suffering from high levels of stress: intense rage (definite), murderous hatred (definite) and suppressed guilt (supposition) aren't good for anyone's blood pressure.

EDIT: I really thought this would be answered quickly. If you know where Straight Street was (or  is - I think it's still there), the rest is easy.

Temp I can only guess that like me everyone knows the answer but can't think of a good follow up question. It's Paul of course.
I'm just going out so if anyone can come up with one go ahead, if not I'll try to post one later.

Yes - Saul's conversion experience and the curing of his temporary blindness in the house on "the Street which is called Straight" (Via Recta in Damascus). I'd love to know what really happened - how Saul the Pharisee went from "breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord"  to being - well, to being St. Paul.

It's a great story - and probably really happened!

Far more to it than the fundamentalists will ever admit (see John Shelby Spong) - but this is neither the time nor the place for religious ramblings.

Over to you, ferval.

Blast, no-one's taken over. Oh well, here we go   

It's 1567 and our fly has just been disturbed from its snooze in the window of a house in Friar's Wind in Edinburgh by an sudden loud noise. "Michty me, whit was that? All these people passing and now this." said Barbara who lived there as she looked out. She soon found out and gave a statement used in the subsequent investigation. Our fly, true its nature, whizzed off to investigate the three tempting corpses.


Edit - complying with request.

Oh, ferval, why have you done this? I'm not getting involved again, but I can't resist answering. It's Kirk o' Field of course. Darnley strangled with his valet in the grounds of the house of Robert Balfour (brother of Sir James Balfour), and another servant inside, killed by the explosion.

Cecil in London knew all the details - as did most of the nobility of Scotland - before your Scottish queen did...

Will someone please delete that dreadful fly?

OK then, bye bye fly.




Don't blame me Temp, I didn't start it. It must be someone else's turn to come up with a new one.

I am not even going to give you a date, our hero superfly escaped the frog and flew into a huge inviting door on Tinian Island in the Pacific. What happened to him, answers on a postcard please.

Is it the summer of 1945 and the fly could see the atom bomb which would shortly be dropped on Hiroshima?

You have it Vizzer, I wanted the fly to have an interesting end, what happened to him?

Enola's son took a swipe at it and it flew away...

... to England and Richmond, Surrey and a small palace where 2 men met in 1876. The younger man held a packet which he claimed contained pirate treasure. He gave it to the older man who buried the treasure nearby. The buried treasure would later bring great wealth (not to the 2 men in question) but to others.