Infestation

Today

Just back from a jolly few days on the Isle of Wight. We stayed in a fairly ordinary but adequate cottage near Brighstone. One comment in the visitors' book referred to the "problem" with woodlice & earwigs. I saw one of each.

In My Day

In the summer of 1977 at Rowan Avenue we were plagued with woodlice. In the kitchen in the mornings we would see maybe fifty or sixty of these creatures. We swept them up, whereupon they curled up and rolled across the floor like so many ball bearings. The cats showed no interest at all in getting rid of them.

We couldn't track down any source, such as rotten wood, in the house that might be the cause. I didn't find them at all worrying as such; there were just so many of them.

That was until shortly after I brought Becky home from hospital. I'd noticed a small dark-red mark on her abdomen that I assumed was a strawberry mark but I wanted the midwife just to confirm this.

The midwife came on her rounds and I asked her to have a quick look. Becky used to sleep in a carry-cot that was mounted on a tubular steel stand, so well off the floor. I unpopped her Babygro and there, nestled on her vest, was a woodlouse. How had it got there? I flipped the creature away and was apologising to the midwife for the next half-hour as though it had been my slovenly maternal care that had brought this about. I have no idea what the midwife thought, but at least she didn't call Social Services. And, after that, it was woodlouse wars.

All of which means that a single woodlouse seen crawling across the toilet floor of a cottage in a very rural location seems anything but a "problem"!