of mice and men

I was awake till four last night. This is not in itself unusual (I've always been crap at sleeping) but last night, for once, there was a very definite scapegoat for my insomnia. Or rather, a scapemouse.

Growing up in a very old and increasingly dilapidated house, I feared as a child that vermin were but another symptom of material inadequacy - other children had clothes from GAP, other children went on expensive holidays, other children had their own TVs, other children didn't have to watch out for mouse-traps... Though now old enough to spot the fallacy in this ten-year-old's logic, the fact that everyone has mice is one of my sillier favourite things about living in London. Like a campaigner for school uniforms, I find it reassuringly democratic; it's good to know we're all in the same ark.

Esure recently reported that sightings of vermin have increased by up to 62% in the capital, due most probably to less frequent refuse collections. While I would be intrigued to know how exactly one reaches such a conclusion (do they run a Critterstoppers line for upstanding members of the public to report these "sightings"?) they are undoubtedly onto something. People didn't used to talk much about this sort of domestic hassle, beyond perhaps wondering aloud whether Tesco's might stock rat poison; now it is a topic of increasingly zealous debate. Everyone has a mouse story, everyone has a new plan of attack - everyone is beginning to seem worryingly manic, in fact.

I have long harboured an ill-advised penchant for dire horror movies. The Leprechaun series is a current favourite, but you can't beat a good plague. The idea of malevolent giant rabbits or bumble-bees constituting an armageddic threat to the human race has always tickled me, particularly in its hilarious paranoia. I mean, at least in Jurassic Park they were up against dinosaurs - couldn't you just stock up on Raid if the renegade drones were coming? One of the finest scenes of the genre takes place in a kitchen, two girls in strappy nightwear squealing and jumping as they spot more and more ants all around them - on the floor, on the counters, even marching inside the fridge. "What do they want from us?!" one howls, wide-eyed, as the full scale of this sinister invasion hits home.

Except that wasn't in a B-movie, that was in our flat a couple of weeks ago. The ants had appeared suddenly in our fridge a few days before; undercover of the night, we knew not whence, they had sought out our kitchen, of all the kitchens in London, and set up camp alarmingly fast. We didn't know how they'd got into the building, let alone into a hermetically-sealed cooling unit. Already draconian about never leaving food out, there was nothing to draw them in anyway - and yet there they were, tramelling through our kitchen with all the malign precision of Nazis in Poland.

It started with the mice, of course. It was a formulaic invasion, beginning in the kitchen, progressing with droppings and pointless gnawing. I lamented their ruination of a kitchen drawer; "Mate", a friend shook their miserable head, "they pissed in my pasta". Our group fell silent in condolence. Before long, though experienced (I thought) with their verminous kind, the mice in our hice began to baffle. I started to mind their stupidity more than their presence; the mice I was used to ran away when they saw you, darting into some secret crevice with a speed and finesse you could not begrudge, the murine Jerry to your human Tom. But these were different - the rodent MTV generation, they would see you, scuttle a metre or so, stop, and panic. You could almost see the speech bubble saying, "Shit! Where do I go?" One actually charged me in my bedroom; another watched me bathe one night because it couldn't remember how it had got in to get out again. "Go back to the pipes, you stupid thing! Behind the toilet!" I found myself squawking, jumpier than I'd dreamt possible in a bubble-bath and a face-mask. "Mate..." I began in the pub that night. Apparently that trumped even the pasta.

The ants were altogether more sinister, though. As Leila and I still cry to anyone who will listen, "they come back for their dead. Actually come back for the bodies". ("Why, do they eat them?", mused my stepdad, pandora's box of pest paranoia). Their organisation is frightening; you know where you are with a mouse - an ant probably knows where you are right now. "What do they want from us?" seems a reasonable question; evil genius always has a plan.

I have been observing Leila's interaction with our unwanted sub-lets with particular interest. A charity-campaigning vegetarian, I didn't tell her about the mouse poison when she first moved in for fear it might upset her. Now there she stood before me squashing ants with kitchen roll, the Buddhist from the Kleenex advert gone mad. When she found some in the toaster, she wanted to "let the bastards fry". Even for a pacifist, this is war. A war, no less, of hearts and minds. After months of banging on doors to make mice run away before we have to see them, kicking the wall in bed at night to stop them gnawing through, and screaming and jumping in shock when they do anyway, I'd mug for Valium. After Ali's triumphant installation of a plug-in ultrasonic repellent that "makes them go crazy", the mice probably would too. We have started to debate further Guantanamo techniques, like making them watch Waterloo Road. Even the idea of humane traps is corrupted, as Leila gleefully narrates the tale of a mouse accidentally shaken to death inside one. Oh, how the moral have fallen.

It strikes me now that we have crossed a line, quite possibly of ants, and that it can't be healthy. Vermin are no longer a mundane problem, to be dealt with like cleaning the toilet or unblocking the sink; they are an all-consuming enemy upon which to expend increasing amounts of emotion and strategy. Plague invasion films no longer seem so deranged, and we may yet turn to darker arts than dire TV drama. The exorcists of the trade know this well; the name, Pied Piper Pest Control, has certainly reassured our household in its fantasism. I just hope it works before I find myself outside Camden tube preaching the imminence of locusts - for we are living in Biblical times...