LIFE: Suburban siege, by Sackerson

It starts around five a.m., before the school cockerel across the way begins his crazy yelling.

The neighbour’s cat is waiting by the kitchen door, strategically placed so she will catch my eye when I go down to make the tea. She breathes in a sachet of catmeat and comes upstairs a few minutes later to remind me that she wants Go-Cat to follow.

She is very skittish. Almost her first act as a kitten was to hurtle up a tall conifer on the other side of her owner’s fence; after several ladder attempts, it took a tree surgeon in climbing gear to get her. Later we heard the owner saying, ‘If you go up that tree again Mummy’s going to be very cross with you.’

And very greedy. At one point it was three packets a day from us, over and above what she was getting at home. At first we thought she was a tom, so nervous and impulsive was she; we still use the male and female pronouns interchangeably; she’s a trans cat. What dispelled all doubt as to her assigned gender was when the pink buttons began to protrude from her fair round belly.

Then it’s the ants. The patch of lawn out front has a mound fit for crown green bowling. There was more than one colony, the pest control man said, as he set out the bait for the ones who invaded our living room. Repointing the bottom course of bricks hadn’t deterred them, they’d chewed a fresh route through the mortar in weeks. Those larger ones are gone, but now the smaller outdoor lot are blackening the double glazed windows of our porch as they prepare to fly, so I have to leave the outer door open until nightfall. I haven’t the heart to poison them; they were here before us and our thirties semi.

As evening falls the slugs begin their attack. They come from the back garden, fresh from chewing the clematis, and get into the kitchen; how, we’re not sure, but the heavy door has sunk on its hinges a bit and left a sliver of a crack at the top, though we’ve never caught them crossing. Switch on the light and there they are, climbing the cupboards, getting under the toaster, leaving gossamer threads by the sink, slobber on the cat’s plate and a well-worn silver trail by the kickboards. There are large and small, orange and leopard-spotted ones; one night, going out to the bin, I saw what looked like a naval battle group, the aircraft carrier in the centre.

I have a sneaking regard for their tenacity, but they have to go. I pick them up with kitchen paper; they curl up like soldiers awaiting a beasting; a flick of the wrist sends them back into the dark void. Light, that’s the key: for the last few days I’ve left a work surface fluorescent tube on and it’s been no-shows ever since. Energy costs are zooming, but it’s a toss-up between the electricity meter and the cost of kitchen paper and bursts of multi-surface cleaner.

Night, and absurdly long-legged spiders stalk across the carpet while we watch TV. I think they come up from below the gas fire and back boiler; there’s another air vent at the foot of what was the front room chimney in the through lounge; it won’t have been through the hole high in the wall British Gas made us have, that blew down a steady stream of cold air until we blocked it, only untaping it for the annual service. Funny how spiders freeze when you look at them; so do the slugs.

Annually it’s the wasps, getting aggressive in the autumn. One year they used the ventilation brick below the damp proof course to build a nest in the wallspace, and we could hear a regular loud thrumming as they cooled their over-insulated home.

And of course we feed the birds, even though sunflower hearts have doubled in price since the war in Ukraine, where they come from. It’s a pleasure to see sparrows, tits, finches, robins, starlings, even a rare tree-creeper or spotted woodpecker; not so much the squirrels, eating from the feeders upside down like a man doing a trick with a pint; nor the insatiable pigeons and villainous magpies. Occasionally owls hoot, hunting along the dual carriageway; they nest in the park, from where we can also catch the sound of woodpeckers.

If only we could afford to live in the country, where intensive farming, insecticides and the persecution of dairy herds almost guarantee peace and quiet for wealthy incomers in their new-build Linden and Persimmon executive homes.