Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

This week I have struggled with the revelation that there is a mouse/are mice in my room.

I had never realised I was afraid of mice before, presumably because I'd never been woken up at 5:45 by the sound of a mouse gnawing at my bedroom door from the inside. Mice in cages are fine, mice at a distance, running freely in some meadow somewhere, that's all fine. But mice in my bedroom is a big no-no.

So that was Tuesday, waking up bright and early. I had to wake up nice and early to go to NUS National Conference anyway, so I laid some (humane) traps, opened my bedroom door and hoped for the best. Didn't seem much point phoning my landlady since she wouldn't have done anything more than that.

But when I got back and examined my room again on Friday, I found the floor covered in mouse droppings. The piano covered in mouse droppings and gnawed. Mouse droppings in the drawer beside my bed. Mouse droppings on top of my bedside cabinet. And (this was one of those real-life nightmare moments) my pyjamas, on the edge of my bed, completely shredded.

There was a mouse. Beside. My pillow.

So that's it. I'm not staying in my room again until the mice (probably plural at this stage, particularly since droppings have since been found elsewhere in the house) are gone. The traps weren't working, there was evidence that the population had expanded, it was time to get pest control in. I phoned my landlady who said she'd call Rentokil in the morning. She called Rentokil, then told me she wasn't going to ask them to come to the house until Monday because it was too expensive to call them out at the weekend.

This annoyed me quite a bit. If it was her property being damaged and pooed all over she'd have them out in a jiffy. And she tried to tell me I hadn't told her soon enough, when she'd first been informed of the mouse problem two weeks earlier (one had been spotted but then vanished again). So I've stumped up the difference between calling someone out at the weekend and on a weekday.

Sam tells me Derek The Mouse Man was very nice and extremely interesting. He's laid two types of poison and will be coming back twice more to clear it up. Apparently mice are neophobic, so if you lay a trap it takes at least two days before they'll pluck up the courage to approach it. And rats can climb up to 13 feet. Psycho has also just told me that mice can squeeze through gaps the size of a penny and sometimes even a biro. Doesn't that make you feel safe in your beds?

So now I'm taking precautions. I've got a can of expanding foam to fill in all gaps with, I'm going to insist that no crumbs remain on the floor and I've got a big pack of Dettol anti-bacterial wipes and some 4-in-1 spray to clean my room top to toe. But I'm still not going back until they're all gone.