Pests

A two-foot silverfish nightmare

(wax model in Hamburg Natural History Museum)

It's a curious business, isn't it, the way we unconsciously acquire behaviours from our families? From my father, for example, I inherited the habit of giving my shoes and my clothes a good shake before putting them on. This made a lot of sense if, like him, you have spent years camped out in the Libyan desert or the jungles of Burma, where scorpions, spiders, snakes, and other nasties find the nooks and crannies of clothing a congenial daytime refuge. In Britain, obviously, this is not so much of a problem, although in autumn the spiders that come into the house for refuge do seem to take a fancy to my boots, it's true, and there was a time when we were regularly invaded by slugs. Until, that is, I discovered the apotropaic properties of self-adhesive copper tape (as described in one of my very first blog posts); highly effective, applied to a threshold, against slugs, witches, elves, and even vampire squirrels. You shall not pass!

However, habitual shaking has proved a necessary caution against a fresh invasion of another unwanted pest: silverfish. In a house full of books and paperwork of various sorts, and in which "housework" tasks such as hoovering up and dusting are neglected, to put it mildly, I suppose this was inevitable. They thrive on the glue of bindings and even paper itself, and whenever I open a book or lift a pile of prints I brace myself for a couple to scuttle out. I really HATE the little fuckers. I have bought various sprays and traps, the most effective of which seem to be the Dekko Silverfish Paks [sic], little cardboard sandwiches containing a boric acid paste, about the size of a bubblegum card, which you can scatter around all their most likely haunts. Nothing is 100% effective, though, and shaking, chasing, and stamping are now embedded in my routines.

There is something rather eldritch about silverfish. They vary in size, from tiny ones a few millimetres in length to the biggest ones which are half an inch or more. Whether this reflects different species or different stages in their lifecycle I haven't investigated. They bristle with extra-long antennae and tail appendages, as if designed for radio-control, and tend to sit motionless, radiating a sort of malevolent dark electricity,  until you make a move to squash them, when they will flee with quicksilver rapidity. They can be incredibly elusive, even when trapped out in the open in the bathtub, as they often are on summer mornings. Crushed, though, they crumble into a cloud of dust, like a vampire exposed to sunlight.

The twelve-inch house fly

(Horniman Museum)

Then in the early autumn there was an invasion of flies in one of our bedrooms. It had a mystifying, Aristotelian quality: the flies seemed to be generating out of nowhere. No matter how many you killed or persuaded to leave, the next morning there'd be more buzzing around or frantically trying to headbutt their way through a window-pane. Plus any we'd missed the day before lying dead or exhausted on the windowsill. In the end, I realised they must be emerging from behind a sheet of hardboard I had taped over an open fireplace to eliminate draughts (in the 1930s, when our house was built, a fireplace in every room was the mod con du jour). The tape had worked loose, and something – probably a pigeon or jackdaw – must have fallen into the chimney void and died there. Although I suppose it might have been a chimney-sweep's boy who had got stuck, given the sheer quantity of flies. Well, kids are obese these days, aren't they? Rather than investigate, I simply retaped the hardboard.

In general, though, I am absurdly soft-hearted when it comes to the more benign household invaders, such as spiders, moths, and even most flies. Like Zen poet Kobayashi Issa, I tend to let the spiders do their thing:

sumi no kumo anji na susu wa toranu zo yo
Spiders in the corners,
Don't worry!
I'm not going to sweep them.
Translated by R. H. Blyth

I have made various bug-catching devices from clear plastic CD canisters and cardboard, so that I can trap them and release them back into the open air, even if that's not really what they had in mind. Nooo! The light! I must follow the light!! But should any big buzzy flies make a untrappable nuisance of themselves, then I have a nuclear option: the rubber-band pistol. Zap! It never fails. Although I've never quite managed seven at one blow.

Eat rubber death, fly