The pest I’ll never forget: the cockroaches were everywhere – even on our wine glasses | Insects

I don’t know if cockroaches really could, as we’re often told, survive a nuclear apocalypse, but I can tell you this with certainty: they can definitely survive pest control. “Hopefully that should be a bit better now,” said the friendly exterminator after his first visit to our flat. By the third visit he was speaking more honestly. “The only way to get rid of your cockroaches,” he said, “would be to burn this whole block of flats to the ground.”

It was January 2003 when I moved with my girlfriend Helen into our first London flat. It’s fair to say there were red flags we probably should have spotted. It was suspiciously affordable – £140 a week for a place less than a minute’s walk from Finsbury Park tube station? Sure, the place looked pretty skanky, but it was still spacious for a studio flat. We put the price down to the fact there was absolutely no way of heating the property and signed up.

That winter was bleak – we were freezing cold and, worse, waking up each morning with lines of red bites down our arms and legs. It took us a while to work out the culprits: bedbugs.

Bug spray was deployed, but it just made them angrier – the bites actually got worse. We replaced the mattress and that problem disappeared. (Despite not having encountered bedbugs anywhere since, Helen still checks down the the headboards in every hotel she stays at and won’t let her kids leave their bags on the floor.) The true horror, though, was yet to come.

The lack of central heating wasn’t all bad: as it turned out, it had been keeping another set of houseguests out of sight. Now, with spring approaching, they began to make themselves known. At first it was just in the night. The odd one darting across the bathroom when you turned on a light. But soon we were spotting cockroaches on a daily basis – huge, black and shiny. By April, turning on the light in the middle of the night meant bracing yourself as dozens scurried to safety.

I’d read somewhere that squishing a cockroach simply dispersed their eggs across the room to hatch elsewhere (a myth, it turns out, although they do apparently release dying chemicals that attract more cockroaches to the spot). We took to trapping them under glasses and bowls instead, then waiting for them to die that way. Our living space ended up littered with various pieces of roach-covering crockery. No, we didn’t have people round for dinner.

We did have a particularly memorable Valentine’s Day dinner, though – not for any romantic effort on my part, sadly, but because at one point Helen reached for her wine and ended up grasping the shell of a massive roach that had climbed on to the stem of her glass.

The landlord refused to accept we had an issue. Only when a traumatised Helen resorted to bringing dead bugs to his office in an empty takeaway box did he reluctantly send for the aforementioned pest guy. Although the guy couldn’t fix the problem, he was keen to inform us that we had oriental cockroaches – black rather than brown, and apparently much bigger and harder to kill than the more common German ones. His eyes lit up a bit when talking about it. At least someone was enjoying themselves.

Mercifully, our rental agreement was only for six months. The feeling of living without cockroaches was overwhelming and joyful – although it wasn’t total freedom. I retained a fear that one of them might have snuck into a suitcase and followed us to the next property. For a while I saw pointy little antennae everywhere. I’ve still not totally shaken it.