There was a rat army in my flatshare, gnawing through pipes, carpets and even a bedroom door. That’s not to mention the mice …
We should have known we were in trouble when we saw that the garden of our new place backed on to a Chinese restaurant in Hackney, London, with terrible reviews. Before long, the rats started coming in through the pipes. It was ratmageddon, and every day it got more harrowing. They trooped over our kitchen, like the world’s worst sequel to Ratatouille. They calmly walked into rooms while we were watching telly. They gnawed through all the carpets to try to get into our bedrooms.
There was no stopping them. After sniffing out the remnants of an old snack in my housemate Simon’s bin, a pack of rats got to work one night gnawing through the wood at the bottom of his bedroom door. Like a rodent military exercise, they spent eight hours whittling a hole large enough to get through. I lay next door, 100% freaked out, panicking they’d try to get into my room next. I didn’t sleep a wink. Fairly soon after this, one of the rats died under the floorboards so we got a bottle-fly infestation to boot. Naturally, our landlord did nothing about any of this.