After creating Maus, his comic strip version of the Holocaust, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman had a recurrent dream of being chased by a huge mouse weighing 5,000 pounds.

By co-incidence, that’s the weight of the two metal Mickey Mouse ears on the water tower – known as the Earful Tower – on the Disney-MGM studio lot in Hollywood.
Gigantic mice are still the stuff of nightmare. But gigantically pricey mice are already with us, right here in Hackney.

Let me explain... Years ago, when we moved to N16, I rang the Council’s Pest Department to report a mouse sighting. Round came a slow-spoken, slow-moving, suspicious-eyed geezer in blue overalls, with a nice line in mangled Dickensian grammar and an almost fanatical, or fantastical, respect for ‘mices’, as he called them. ‘Oh, they’re nimble, your mices! Up that table-leg in a trice! And talk about strong! Gnaw through concrete, your mices will.’ 

Opining that the mice were nesting in the dingly-dellish stems of a false orange tree in the garden, the pest man went round the house distributing little red plastic takeaway type trays brimming with poisoned barley. The remedy seemed as antiquated as the man himself. The black barley seeds looked exactly like mouse droppings. Would I eat them, if I were a mouse? Mice aren’t wholefood fanatics. They prefer chocolate, or cheese.
But so do small, crawling children, aka rug rats – maybe the Pest Department’s unappetizing bait was chosen on legal advice. At any rate, the mice weren’t tempted, and soon I was off to KAC in Church Street in search of another solution. For some reason I can’t recall – fear for the delicate fingers and toes of my own small children? chronic sentimentality? or had I recently converted to Buddhism? – I avoided sprung traps of the Big Cheese and Little Nipper variety, opting instead for an absurd plastic trap, made in the Netherlands, which socially excluded the mouse.

In a form of house arrest, a plastic door swung shut behind the mouse seeking goodies on the other side of it. On the box was the admonition that to avoid ‘mouse stress’ the captured animal should be set free as quickly as possible (so passing the problem on to someone else). As pest control it was just about preferable to sitting down with the rodent and trying to get it to see reason. I never got the chance to try out the Dutch trap, accidentally destroying it within the day by stepping on it. So it was back to KAC again – and within the week some sensibly lethal Little Nippers baited with chocolate had seen off our mouse problem. 

Since then, much has changed in the world of rodent control. For around forty pounds, for example, householders can now buy a device emitting a high-pitched scream unbearable to mice, a kind of Pied Piper in reverse (so much for avoiding mouse stress).

But little has changed at the Pest Department. This winter, when our mouse problem returned, the young and thrusting, post-modern pest operative dispensed the same low-tech mouse remedy – poisoned barley – as his slow-motion predecessor all those years ago. One thing has changed, however. Then, the treatment was free. Now, it costs. 

Our bill for the barley was a stunning ninety-four pounds. And it wasn’t even as if the barley had been jazzed up somehow in the interim. The mice still didn’t seem interested in it. As before, I was soon laying down chocolate-baited Little Nippers. Three nights running, the Nippers bagged a mouse per night. Later I found two more dead under a kitchen cabinet. Assuming those two were poisoned, each had cost forty-seven pounds.

That is costlier than caviare. Of course, mouse numbers are hard to calculate. Mice present the almost philosophical problem of uncertainty as to whether one has seen only one mouse, several times, or several mice, each once. Where there’s one mouse, it’s said, there will be at least twenty. So maybe my tally of five mice is merely the tip of a miceberg. Maybe the barley killed a lot more mice, which crawled off to die somewhere else out of sight, out of mind. But I don’t think so. The one-equals-twenty theory results in an illogicality. If it were true, for every mouse you caught there would be nineteen more still to catch. The more mice you got rid of, the more mice there would be. I think there were five mice, and we got the lot.

The numerical uncertainty has a serious dimension. No man is an island, and no house is a closed system. As Camus recognized in his novel La Peste, there’s nothing quite like vermin to make people realize just how interdependent society is. Vermin aren’t privatisable. Poor private hygiene may encourage them, but their mobility makes them a public health problem. Did the unusually cold winter drive those mice into our house? Were they overspill from the rubbish on the streets, or were they, on the contrary, a symptom of the success of Wheelie Bins (which are said to be driving starving urban foxes to attack cats)? I don’t know. But one thing I’m sure of – public health is not served by a prohibitive charge that in effect turns vermin into a protected species.

‘my tally of five mice is merely the tip of a miceberg’