Terry Prone: When it comes to woodlice, I’m Albert Pierrepoint — fast and efficient

'If you live in a Martello tower, you do not have air conditioning. You can’t afford it, for starters, because old buildings are always trying to fall down or apart, and prevention is costly.' Picture: Ruth Medjber

If you found the weekend a bit hot, you get a sympathy vote. But I put it to you that you did not have to deal with indoor wildlife, a growling toilet, or an upchucking cat while facing the prospect of strangers walking through your bedroom. As I did.

If you live in a Martello tower, you do not have air conditioning. You can’t afford it, for starters, because old buildings are always trying to fall down or apart, and prevention is costly.

But, even if you had the cash, how would you even begin to manage the air inside walls that are nine feet thick?

The fact that a tower is circular, though, does provide advantages. The main one being in high summer, that you can open windows on all sides, thereby providing enough of a draught to prevent dwellers from keeling over. Opening the windows does complicate things, though.

You get ghettoblaster hard rock from the beach at such volume it makes you wonder if you’re going to get palpitations synchronous with the beat. You also get daddy long legs, which are the certified eejits of the insect kingdom. They don’t do anything useful, but because they’re so self-evidently harmless, you feel guilty about killing them.

One of the lesser-known consequences of climate change is that I become a killer during the summer months. Always pretty ruthless about bluebottles and wasps, this year I’ve added in woodlice. I’d need to confirm it with Éanna Ní Lamhna, but I am convinced that we have an unprecedented outbreak of them currently.

If my home were occupied only by me and the woodlice, co-living would be a happy option, but during the summer months, visitors come for the tour, and you don’t want tourists trying to compete with woodlice for floor space.

Early on in her career, Specs, my cat, used to hunt woodlice, giving them pokes with her front paws to make them go faster and be worth pursuing.

Other wildlife, including big spiders, can put on an impressive turn of speed if cat-nudged, and that speed speaks to a primeval feline need.

Woodlice don’t seem to be capable of increased speed, and so Specs gave up on hunting them. Instead, I have to stamp on them and then vacuum up the corpses.

You might interpret “stamp” as vicious, on my part, but you would be wrong. If I have to kill wildlife, I am committed to being the Albert Pierrepoint of insect execution: it is going to be fast and flawless. 

Albert, you will remember, was an English hangman who did away with 600 criminals (a handful of whom may have been innocent, but let’s not go there). He did nixers in this country. In fact, he did nixers here frequently enough to become, effectively, our locum executioner.

He prided himself, did Albert, on the science he brought to his trade. He weighed and measured and timed to ensure that the condemned human fell through a trapdoor and had their neck simultaneously broken by the rope.

This obviated the bad hangings, which amounted to slow strangulation, causing kindly relatives of the person being executed to drag on their legs to speed up the process.

Bad hangings after the Nuremberg trials led to reflex leg movements that became known as the ‘Spandau Ballet’, and gave rise to the name of that band.

When it comes to woodlice, I’m Pierrepoint: fast and efficient. Not quite as fast as my late husband used to be with earwigs, but his aversion to earwigs was total. He saw them as the embodiment of evil.

But then, anything with more than two legs inside a house draws the family into disrepute.

Wildlife can put on an impressive turn of speed if cat-nudged, and that speed speaks to a primeval feline need.  Picture: iStockphoto

I remember preparing a man for a major promotion interview in my kitchen, once. The job was so
important and evoked such media interest that if he’d come to our offices, he might have been spotted, and two and two might have been added together.

Hence, my kitchen in a previous dwelling, a camera on a tripod capturing his every answer. He was doing pretty well until one question seemed to cause him to silently freeze. He was looking, not at me or the lens, but at the floor behind me. A glance back revealed an audience of one.

A curious mouse. I flailed at the mouse with a newspaper and pointed out that we lived by the sea and didn’t have cats, which was true at the time.

The job aspirant was too polite to criticise, but you could tell he had lost confidence in the whole process.

Rodents, where I now live, are assassinated or prevented by Specs, although I worry that, now she is headed for her 20th year — which is pretty advanced for a cat — she may put in for retirement.

In fact, I was discussing this with her on Friday morning and advancing the theory that her life, in common with that of most humans, would be greatly improved by not retiring.

Humans who give up the day job end up walking the Camino or — worse still — walking the Salt Path, and you know where the latter gets you.

Well, OK, it got the one who wrote the book about £11m before things came apart a bit, but the future doesn’t look promising — in publication terms — for her.

Specs reacted to my advice by throwing up on the coverlet of my bed, which had been washed and dried only the day before.

“You’re adding to the water shortage,” I told her, as I turfed the thing into the wash for another go-around. 

I had an urge to go and confess to Uisce Éireann because I was already failing with the upstairs toilet, which went on strike during the week and had to have its innards replaced by Bryan, who describes himself as a handyman, and is. Very handy. Usually.

In this instance, something seems to have gone slightly wrong, because, downstairs quietly reading a Robert Crais thriller — there are few more rewarding pleasures — I registered a sporadic growl. Now, if wildlife large enough to growl had come in through the cat flap, Specs would muster her not-extensive courage and knock hell out of it. She didn’t even rouse herself from sleep for a minute in response to the growl. I timed it.

It seemed to happen about every seven minutes. I wandered the house, leaving Elvis Cole, the Crais private eye whose business card describes himself as “the biggest dick in the business”, face down on the arm of my chair.

All became clear. The growl was coming from the upstairs toilet, which was managing to lightly spray the tiled floor of the wet room with every groan.

“Hell,” I thought, “if short-taken visitors arrive before Bryan does, they can use the downstairs loo.

“I’ll find a way to frame malfunctioning lavatories as an amusing aspect of the narrative of Martello living.”