Why I had to carpet all those pesky moths

The BBC, always eager to involve decent ratepayers in Blue Peter-style nonsense, has urged us to record sightings of moths on our estates. Well, I am having none of it. Indeed, on one website’s invitation to tick love or hate moths, I opted for the latter, along with 36 per cent of the sentient population.

True, I do not hate all moths, and I recorded my vote in an emotional spasm. But it is also true that, generally speaking, with the exception of bees, I find insects deplorable and fear that one day they will inherit the Earth. You can throw sticks for them all day, and they just sit there looking at you as if you were stupid, which is not the case at all.

In the meantime, gather round and fill your flagon from that bowl of meths and elderflower punch and I’ll tell you about the Mother of all Moths. It all began one spring evening when I found a little creature fluttering about my laptop. I wasn’t sure what it was. It wasn’t fat and fluffy like the moths that blunder into lights. It was thin and lithe.

I decided to befriend it and even offered it a bit of my bridie. That was my first mistake. Not the bridie – I was only offering out of politeness and, luckily, it didn’t want any. Nope, befriending: that was the mistake.

Within two years, I was killing this beast’s offspring at the rate of 10 a day. They’d become malevolent presences, sitting broodily on the walls, too dim to fly away when I approached with the killer sheet of lavatory roll. I’d experimented with many ways of butchering the beasts, but a quick snatch with a piece of tissue became the most efficient.

Had I not taken action this year, I’d have killed 1,400 by summer’s end. They prospered as a result of my ignorance, which is gargantuan. When I first realised I had a problem, I’d assumed the beasts were clothes moths. Coincidentally, a couple of my woolly pullovers had been holed. I spent a small fortune on mothballs, lavender, chemical strips and thermo-nuclear aromatics, but I managed to see these off (they came from second-hand pullovers ordered on eBay).

True, I’d noticed holes in the study carpet but, Homer Simpson-like, had merely thought “holes” before replacing the thought with an image of a cow playing the ukelele.

Many months later, I looked under the living-room sofa to find more holes than carpet. When I probed further, the beasts fluttered out, and so I had identified my enemy: carpet moths. Researching online, I found stories about these plaguing parts of Edinburgh and London. Citizens were being driven demented by them.

In a Hulk-like rage, I ripped up all the carpets in the house. Visitors started noticing, saying things like: “Incidentally, you haven’t any carpets.” But I would just nod absently and, in a distant voice, say: “Yes.”

I’ve spent this last week sanding all the floors, which has led me to doubt the existence of Our Lord. It hasn’t been so much the sanding as the moving of furniture and books. And, oh, the inconvenience. Yesterday morning, I couldn’t get fresh underpants as the chest of drawers where these are kept under lock and key was facing a wall and hemmed in by detritus. As Thursday is pants-changing day, it’ll just have to wait till next week.

The incident in which I kicked over a £45 tin of wood varnish caused a salvo of unholy words to gush forth from my throat. Through windows opened for sanding, these foul utterances raged forth to the street where several neighbours had gathered to talk about me (well, if they weren’t then, they are now). One made the sign of the cross.

My stock in the community has fallen. My finances are in disarray. My house is in chaos. Even the television is unaccounted for.

All because of one moth. So don’t talk to me about Moth Night. More like Moth Nightmare.