In a cheap London flat with no heating, dozens of the insects swarmed, leading to a Valentine’s Day that still makes me break out in a cold sweat
I don’t know if cockroaches really could, as we’re often told, survive a nuclear apocalypse, but I can tell you this with certainty: they can definitely survive pest control. “Hopefully that should be a bit better now,” said the friendly exterminator after his first visit to our flat. By the third visit he was speaking more honestly. “The only way to get rid of your cockroaches,” he said, “would be to burn this whole block of flats to the ground.”
It was January 2003 when I moved with my girlfriend Helen into our first London flat. It’s fair to say there were red flags we probably should have spotted. It was suspiciously affordable – £140 a week for a place less than a minute’s walk from Finsbury Park tube station? Sure, the place looked pretty skanky, but it was still spacious for a studio flat. We put the price down to the fact there was absolutely no way of heating the property and signed up.