'Can you stop shuffling about, please. I want to go to sleep', I had unsuspectingly said to a friend who was staying over. It was about 4AM, we had just returned from some club. Needless to say, we were not the soberest of people at the time. To my great horror, my friend denied having made any noises whatsoever. It felt like some really bad cartoon, like the scenes where all you can see is two pairs of eyes in the dark, when suddenly a third pair appears. We soon realised we were not alone. Rodents must have found their way into my flat. Great. Intoxicated as we were, we soon came up with a number of dubious anti-rodent solutions: we could lay out a trail of cheese leading straight into the microwave, we could chase it to death or we could try hoovering it up. Fortunately, our drunken state prevented both these ideas and the mice from being executed.

The next morning we found tiny bite marks in a plastic bag. The rodent plague had not been a creation of our drunken imagination. Now, everyone knows that mice are not supposed to live and breathe in suburban accommodation, hence I had to get rid off them in due course. But how? I didn't really feel like shifting tiny rodent corpses around, and the idea of having a smelly poisoned rodent behind the sofa was not very appealing either. I decided to consult friends and colleagues about the problem, which soon turned out to be a bad move, for I soon realised that everyone I asked must be leading a secret life exterminating nuisance creatures. Students morphed into poison experts, raging treehuggers told me that only a dead mouse was a good mouse, and one colleague even advised me on how to construct the perfect trap with help of superglue and large wedges of Mature Cheddar. It was after another colleague brought me Persian cat hair wrapped in tinfoil that I began to doubt these well-meant pieces of advice and sought help from an expert. The expert, in this case, was the owner of a local hardware shop, a weedy looking pensioner with a somewhat malicious look on his face. Just what I needed.

Up to this point, I had spent little thought on anti-rodent devices ('I need a mouse trap.' - 'Obviously, but what kind of mouse trap?') and the multitude of shapes and models they come in. Naturally, my new expert friend wasted no time in going through 'Mouse traps for Dummies', whether I liked it or not. Did you know that there are round boxes, similar to those used for ants, that hold up to eight poisoned mice? Nice, isn't it? Or that there really are 'glue traps' to stop the speedy rodent from going any further? They run in on one side and are never to be seen again. Nifty, huh? I also learnt that your bog standard (but branded) mouse trap is actually called 'The Little Nipper' (complete with the appropriate slogan 'The Last Thing They Do Is Nip') and that these are available in different sizes, depending on how big a rodent you're 'dealing' with. Alternatively, if you don't want a rodent skeleton in your closet, why not catch the culprit alive? All you need is a specially designed plastic tube that tips over and magically locks the rodent in, ready to be picked up and 'taken to the nearest field' (Streatham Common it is then...). And don't forget that every rodent's favourite bait is not cheese, but peanut butter. That's every rodent but mine, because I'm on the second jar of peanut butter by now...