Interlopers

Dear readers, 

Apologies once again for the time that has elapsed since this blog post and the last one. Your correspondent has been waging war again, this time on the interlopers inhabiting my kitchen: cockroaches.

I have an immense and unreasonable fear of cockroaches. It’s the way they move that gets me. It’s never a great start to the day to walk into the kitchen to find a roach scurrying across the work-surface in the direction of your breakfast. Or to put a piece of toast in the toaster only to have one leap out at you as you switch on the heat. It’s my kitchen and my toaster! And it was certainly time for the interlopers to leave.

Over the course of a couple of months I had managed to empty more than two cans of roach spray into the kitchen all to no avail. The mere smell of the spray was enough to set my pulse racing and I was on the brink of giving myself nerve damage. If things continued the way they were I was quite likely to die of fume-inhalation... They would find me after several days, dead on my back with my arms and legs in the air, twitching slightly...

Things finally came to a head one evening. After a hard day of cleaning, tidying and installing new furniture, hampered by a heavy cold, I had gone into the kitchen to make steak and chips for supper. I stepped away from the kitchen for less than five minutes but came back to discover that the cooker had blown up and there was yet another cockroach getting ready to drag away my steak. It felt like a disaster of catastrophic proportions.

I called my mum. Given the gravity of the situation it was the only proper thing to do. My mum deserves a medal for the number of ledges and high places she has talked me down from over the last few months. She is remarkably good in a crisis, possessing a honed ability to set me back on course once again.

After the phone call I regrouped, drove myself to the nearest hotel, ordered the largest steak on the menu, then sat back to consider my game plan. The cockroaches had certainly won this round, but they had not yet won the war. And if I stopped to think about it objectively I had pest control on my side, so things were not looking good for the cockroaches. We would fight – fight to the death. We would go to the mattresses!

The next morning I put in two phone calls: one to the electrician to come and revive the cooker and one to pest control. Within hours of their visit there were roach corpses littering the kitchen, the hall and even one of the bedrooms. It was clear that the apartment had been harbouring a problem.

I gave it ten days and another can of spray before I called pest control back for another round, to drive out my more hardened adversaries. This time they were thorough.

The final frontier was the kitchen window. It had never been entirely clear where the cockroaches were actually coming from but I had my suspicions that the window was in some way responsible. It is no ordinary window: it’s covered and it has about it a rather sinister air. It overlooks an internal ventilation shaft and I am personally of the opinion that this is from whence the cockroaches came. I turned to the only two lines of defence left available to me: traps and boric acid.

Boric acid comes in the form of a white powder and as I stood at my kitchen window, sprinkling a neat line of white powder along it, it occurred to me that it might be difficult to explain my actions in the event of an in-opportune visit from the authorities. Once finished I laid a neat row of cockroach traps on top of the powder, creating an impenetrable line of defence against the invertebrate kingdom. I stood back, appreciated my courage and ingenuity and attempted to get on with my life. 

Things were going well until several nights later when I was back in the kitchen cooking supper. A pair of antennae appeared on the far side of the toaster. I squealed and leapt backwards – standard – and the damned thing scuttled up the side of the toaster and buried itself inside. My reaction, naturally, was to douse the toaster liberally in roach spray and only after having emptied another half can did it dawned on me that roach spray and toaster might not be an award-winning combination.

I called my mum. Given the gravity of the situation it was the only proper thing to do. She suggested I turn the toaster on. Her reasoning was that it would either fry or evict the cockroach, and if I was going to run the risk of blowing the toaster up it was better to do it while she was on the other end of the phone and able to alert someone of my predicament should the worst happen. After consideration I went with her plan and am pleased to confirm that the worst did not in fact happen. The cockroach did finally venture out, although not before time, and was quickly dispatched by me.

Since then, more than three weeks have past, and I am delighted to report that in the battle of Charlotte versus Cockroaches, Charlotte (assisted by three cans of roach spray, two visits from pest control, a variety of traps, and a quantity of boric acid) has prevailed and taken back possession of her kitchen.

So long Cockroaches! It’s my kitchen now!