There's a rat in the kichen...

You all know about the noisy neighbours, right? The ones who stay up all night partying, drinking, singing Girls A-bleeding-loud songs, and then try to kill each other. I've had to put up with this for nearly three years', and before you think I'm just an old Moaning Myrtle, they do this most nights.

Well, about two months' ago, the miserable gits started stripping wallpaper at 3am. Scrape, scrape, scrape against the wall behind your bed isn't much fun. This carried on for a week, until the proverbial penny dropped; they weren't scraping - there were mice in the adjoining wall. I rang Environmental Health the next day. You know you're getting old, when the mouse-catcher looks he should still be in school.

The problem turned out to be RATS in the wall schnucking in from an outside drain. Yes, RATS. Sewage-stained, filthy, dirty, bubonic plague carrying RATS.

"Oh Christ," I shrieked. " Please tell me they won't get into the house!"

"Well, that's where they're heading, love; they're looking for a food source."

He obviously hadn't caught on to the diplomacy part of the job...

Three bags of raspberry-coloured bait down the man-hole cover, and Bob's your uncle. Not.

Three weeks, and seven bags of bait, later, they'd eaten through the cavity wall, up the cavity wall, and along the floorboards. They were planning on dropping, SAS style into the kitchen on ropes, filling up a goodie bag and scampering back under the floorboards.

Not on my watch.

For two nights, I chased them around the house, banging the downstair's ceilings to scare the nasty little buggers back to the drain.

On day three, I was exhausted, irritable and neurotic; these had to be Super-rats - the size of small hippos, at least.

By sobbing and wailing into the phone, I managed to get a workman in the same day to cement up the drain pipe (luckily, not the one collected to the loo...). For the first time in weeks, I relaxed; the rodents were well and truly cemented out.

Until the rat-man came later the same day, sighed in frustration, and pointed out that I may now have trapped them inside the house.

Double eek!