If this column were a movie, it would come with a clutch of trigger warnings: discrimination, scenes of violence, injury detail. I’m not by nature in favour of killing, but sometimes you are driven to it. Or that’s my story, anyway.
When we moved to the country, I found an old mousetrap at the back of the hot water tank cupboard in the room where I work. I binned it, without another thought.
A couple of years later, entering the kitchen one winter’s morning I snapped on the light and found myself eye to eye with a little creature that had emerged from the warmth behind the boiler. Only its snout, whiskers and bright eyes were visible but as I stared, instead of turning tail it tiptoed across the floorboards towards me, as if to take a better look. Clearly what it saw was not a predator wielding the power of life and death over it and all rodent-kind, but a provider of cheese, chocolate and, in an ideal world, organic peanut butter.
By lunchtime, the gaps around the boiler had been plugged with steel wool, and as weeks passed without further visitors it seemed our problems were over. Then, sometime later, I returned to my desk after making a coffee, and discovered a pile of chewed rubber by my laptop. In the time it takes for a kettle to boil my pencil’s eraser had been shredded.
There was a noise from the corner of the room, where the culprit was taking shelter behind a pile of books. A quick dash to a neighbour produced a humane mouse trap, which I baited to no avail. After several........