The smell of Mortein in the morning....

We’ve been lucky with the wildlife outdoors so far - there’s plenty of weird and wonderful stuff in the garden (see below) but we’ve not come across anything deadly. This is something of a relief because if you listen to some people every bush is laden with creatures dripping venom. However, some of the indigenous species are apparently only happy when they’re sharing your house.

Llywelyn arrived from the UK a couple of days ago to find me traumatised after an incident in the utility room. I had donned a pair of rubber gloves to wash some cycling kit (the water is very hot; it’s not that the kit was particularly unpleasant) and, after a while, felt something moving against my forefinger. I thought I’d touched a zip or something so carried on but then felt it again. I pulled off the glove to find a brown, barbed leg stuck to my finger, together with some brown scales. Turning the glove inside out revealed a mangled, rather soggy, cockroach, minus one leg. I’d obviously given it a good poke because it was, thankfully, dead.

They’re pretty common here and Sara has long adopted a regime of unwavering vigilance and powerful chemicals. I used to find a rolled-up newspaper took care of most things back home, especially the Daily Mail, because the sheer weight of prejudice contained within squashed most things flat. But I arrived here to find that Sara had become a great fan of Mortein, which seems to be a descendant of Agent Orange and DDT.


Death in a can

It works like this. You find a cockroach and you spray it with Mortein. The roach then flies straight at you and hangs on. If Sara’s wielding the can, she then sprays both you and the roach and tells you to stop complaining. The roach falls to the floor and lies on its back (I know how they feel) but it’s just teasing you. Try to sweep it into the dust pan and it’ll flip over and scurry off. Sara applies more chemicals at this stage; I tend to hit it with the can. If you can lop something off, it helps. They take a long time to die and the garden ants eat them alive, once immobilized. And they call this the lucky country.

We’ve also had Huntsman spiders in the lounge. They’re three to four inches across, hairy and muscular, and they can, and do, bite but they’re not poisonous. You wouldn’t want to squash them as the mess on your furnishings would be dreadful. Curiously, they react to Mortein (any port in a storm) in much the same way initially, as they leap off the wall towards you looking irritated. Further applications cause then to rear up on the hind legs and wave the front ones aggressively but they do slow down a bit. This is your chance to drop a glass over them and slide some paper underneath, giving you an opportunity to study your prey, if you wish. Deposit them in the garden and they stagger off into the undergrowth, spitting Mortein, and presumably working out how they can get back into the house.

Much as I abhor the use of powerful chemicals, I do find it satisfying to open the garage to find three or four recumbent roaches, victims of the surface spray version of Sara’s insecticide of choice. And I do love the smell of Mortein in the morning.