Return of the roach

A couple of months ago, we had our first full on cockroach infestation. What started off as the sighting of a few roaches like this lovely one...

quickly turned into a night time party in our kitchen.

Every night, our kitchen would be turned into a roach gas chamber as I tried to annihilate the little S@%&s with anti-roach spray. And myself in the process.

My lungs and the planet couldn’t take much more so I moved on to the age-old Singaporean method - pandan leaves. 

These little natural gems are said to aggravate their respiratory system making roaches run the other way. Yes - so much so that every time I got home and put the light on, the roaches had run so far they had come full circle and ended up resting back up on the pandan leaves.  Can you detect my air of sarcasm here?

So for all Singapore taxi drivers out there relying on this method to keep your taxis roach-free….forget it!

Eventually we had no choice but to call pest control in. And it worked. But guess what? The source was one lowly roach trap left by the previous tenant, expired and serving as a party house for all those lovely roaches in our kitchen.

So if you’ve put roach traps down you better damn well remember when and where you did so or get ready for a roach fiesta.

Anyway this morning I was re-organizing our filing system up in the study and then BLOODY HELL almost jumped out of my skin when I saw a HUGE roach scuttle up and over one of the dividers. Too much to take on a Saturday morning at 9am!!!

What I want to know is WHY WHY WHY?

Mr Roach – there is no food in our study.  But there is no use reasoning with our friendly neighbourhood roaches. After all, they can and will survive without humans, eating anything organic – they can even eat glue from the bindings of our books because they're made of animal protein.

They can live 3 months without food, 1 month without water and can survive 45 minutes without air. And yes it’s proven they can survive nuclear fall out.

Pretty concerning seeing as these little bugs can carry some big diseases – dysentery, typhoid, gastroenteritis and poliomyelitis.

In Singapore – as in other tropical climes - you have to learn to live side by side with these little cretins. No matter how clean you are, what food you are not leaving out, and despite all the anti-insect spraying that goes on here, we are in Asia and no amount of human meddling can wipe these little Trojans out.