What happened to all the bugs?

It is currently the 5th of April 2025. I am sitting in bed at my hotel in Prague, with my laptop out after a week of roaming the streets of Europe. I have another two weeks of it ahead of me. This is being written after having read some pages of “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I am not that far into it. It seems complicated. But it’s important to mention so you know I read books, and it has nothing to do with the following post.

As a kid, from the ages of around 6 to 10, we used to go on holiday in France with what I feel like an odd regularity. Maybe I am misremembering it, but I think there are only so many times a childhood should have memories of being in a tent in France whilst some form of extreme weather occurred outside. I suppose for a white British middle-class family living on the English south coast, it was only a short ferry across the pond. And it was technically a foreign destination.

I remember, in the way one remembers childhood^[1], a specific summer in the early 2000’s we went to France. I think we went camping somewhere for a week during the height of summer. I don’t know where exactly, my geography wasn’t that great as an ~8 year old. I remember it being intensely hot and dry, feeling the dead yellow grass beneath my bare feet, and the heat distorting the air around anything which could radiate it back.

One day we went to a miniature Lego town nearby. Not an official one, mind you. The true Lego-heads amongst you know there is no official Lego Parc in France. We rolled up in what I think was our ridiculously huge Hyundai Trajet^[2]. This behemoth of a 7-person people carrier, which was carrying either a 4-person family pre my sister’s birth, or at the absolute most a 5-person family where one of them was literally a baby. You could re-arrange the seats, and even set it up into a “picnic” configuration where the middle seats turned into tables. We did that once. It truly was Homer’s car.

We wondered the hallowed plastic grounds of this barely adequate simulacrum of a French town when the weather had decided it was going to turn in the way it often does in our memories. The sky blackened, the noise level of summer muted, and we made our way back to the car before it would be too late^[3]. We made it, huddled into the car, and started back to the campsite, just as the sky was coming down.

With the heavens open, my parents considered the day ruined. They didn’t need another reason to argue, but they would take everyone which came anyway. As we’re making our way back to the campsite, all of a sudden, there’s this bright flash of lightning ahead of us on the road. It feels like it happened 10 feet away, but I am confident now it was hundreds of meters down the road. At the time, this probably felt like the closest I would come in my life to seeing death until it eventually arrived.

Now I am writing this on the 7th of April. We’re on an overnight sleeper train on our way to Rome. It’s pretty neat, we paid for the nicest room we could on it and I would definitely do it again. This one has a little seat and table which I am writing this on as the night obscured world passes by unknown. We will see how the breakfast is.

This French weather based fiasco probably snowballed and ended up with us returning home early. I don’t really remember. An unfortunate side effect of being just a stone’s throw from a ferry was we were a stone’s throw from being able to leave whenever we wanted.

We would come back in our huge, slab of a people carrier^[4], with the aerodynamics of a brick, absolutely covered in bugs from the continents countryside. This thing was a veritable bug decimator with how caked it would get.

It would be my and my brother’s job to occasionally wash the cars over the summer. I can remember the feeling of the cheap yellow sponge in my hand. Dipping it into the warm soapy water with some cheap cleaning product in it. The heavy black bucket which was dragged along the floor to the car. That feeling of having to scrub and scrub to try and get these dried insects off the front bumper and windshield. Literally a defining part of my childhood in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was getting those crusty bugs off my Dad’s car.

My wife purchased her first car last year. We’ve not taken it to France or anything further affield than East Anglia. Nor driven it through the country fields of the south of England. And while it isn't a sports car or anything, it is far more aerodynamic than a literal shed on wheels. But I have noticed that you just don’t get bugs splattered on it at all. If you Google around, it turns out it’s a real thing called the “Windshield phenomenon”. There's been real studies on this that showed yeah, the bugs have been leaving.

I hope one day, I get to have children. And listen, I want to make clear I am not saying the children yearn for the free labour of cleaning their parent’s car. But I do find it fascinating that this one really specific part of my childhood about cleaning bugs off a car won’t be, can't be, replicated.

For some people around my age, they can probably remember a time before the internet. This will be distinct from their children who have grown up surrounded by it. I personally do not remember a time before the internet. My Dad was an early adopter of Al Gore’s World Wide Web. From the mid to late 90’s we had dial-up and computers in the house. I grew up with this, and I can be fairly confident that anyone I am a father to will as well. We will have that in common, even if the method of internet consumption is different. The distinction I will be thinking of is cleaning the car on a hot summers day.

There are times when I sit there and think not much time has passed in the 30 years I have been lucky enough to survive on this Earth. Times I still feel like I am a teenager, wanting to do whatever I want. But then there are those times which ground me, show me how much time has passed and that I should get a grip. I think looking at the front bumpers of cars last year did that. If in the time I have been alive, we have managed to destroy and entire ecosystem of insects to the point of having a noticeable drop in the number of splatters against a car bumper, what else has fucking changed man.

What happened to all the bugs?