I KILLED ten times yesterday.
I expect to kill again today. Indeed, I reckon that since the start of spring I have killed nearly 200 times.
My victims? Well, I'm not sure really. Don't much care for their names. But I think it's mainly Tineola bisselliella. Tineola sounds almost nice. A colourful, foamy drink perhaps.
It is in fact the common clothes moth, and it's infesting my home. Not just mine, I'm glad to say, in cruel human solidarity. Parts of London are suffering the same plague, and other parts of Edinburgh too, as I know anecdotally from friends.
I may have carpet moths too as, in addition to my clothes I've found a couple of holes in floor coverings too. But, from pictures on yonder internet, I'm sure the main culprit is the clothes moth.
I think there were a few here in my suburban semi when I arrived seven years ago. I remember one playing around the computer. I didn't know what it was and, living the lonely life of a writer (hack variety), became fast friends with it. But more have arrived, almost certainly, in vintage woolly pullovers rashly purchased on eBay.
I've tried everything to get rid of the beasts: mothballs of course, paper strips impregnated with insecticide, wee bags of lavender, killer sprays, putting clothes in the freezer, vacuuming every nook. As is usual in my experience on the planet Earth, nothing works.
If you add the bill for this to others for keeping out an excreting, bird-mangling moggy (well over £100), ants and wasps, protecting our properties from pests can be pricey.
It's not that I'm heartlessly cruel. I coax individual bees back to life by feeding them jeely pieces. But I'm not so Disney googoo-gaga that I'll hand over my hoose to moths.
How I have come to detest them. They flutter past as I'm watching telly. But mostly they just sit on the walls being evil. Like most of our sadistic God's creatures, they're exceptionally thick.
If you kill one, the other next to it doesn't think: "Jeezo, I'm out of here." It just sits there waiting its turn. After various efforts at swatting them and whatnot, I now crush them in sheets of loo roll.
Our warm spring promises a population boom among the beasts this year. They are said to prosper in central heating, but my house is freezing cold for most of the day in winter. I know. I have to work in it.
We can (or used to be able to) put a person on the Moon. But we can't eradicate a 3ins moth. Thus the universe puts us in our place again.
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