An invasion is threatening the UK from France - and Brits are bracing for the worst as I would know, because I battled an infestation.
Paris is already burning and London is hunkering down and hoping for the best. This might sound like history, but it is happening right now, so be ready.
As you might have already heard, the French capital has been burning its luggage and abandoning furniture in the street in a bid to overcome a rampant bed bug infestation. Fears of it spreading have been heightened after the country hosted both the Paris Fashion Week and the Rugby World Cup, and with 15 Eurostars arriving in London from Paris a day, there is a general feeling that our own capital may be next on the warpath.
READ MORE: Brits face mutant 'super' bedbugs as Parisian pests know how to beat insecticides
For more bed bug news, click here.
Many articles have flung around the idea that the bed bug menace is being overstated, that the sightings are unverified and the counts relatively low. In other words, it’s all just paranoia. But let me tell you, it’s worth being diligent – they will temporarily ruin your life.
I was just out of university and living in a terraced house in southeast London when one of my housemates brought back a stylish yet practical sideboard, perfect as a shoe rack for his bedroom.
He’d done everything right and the piece looked clean and in good knick. But what he didn’t realise at the time was that a couple of bedbug stowaways had tucked into the crevasses and, in a parasitic, vampiric take on the Trojan Horse, had snuck through the castle gates.
By this point, it was already too late. The infestation started in his room and the other three of us, all blokes not particularly clued up yet on how to operate a house, weren’t that bothered – it was his problem.
But the tricky little monsters spread easily. They can pass through tiny gaps in walls and make going under a shut door look as easy as dropping a pea down a well.
Within a month they were in my room. I didn’t notice them at first, their bites show up differently on different people, but my girlfriend complained of constellations of bites strung along her ankles every time she stayed over. I told her it must have been mosquitoes, desperate for them not to have made the mammoth three-metre move across to my room.
Not long after we moved house and the bedbugs came with us. A couple of months into our nice new place in southwest London the flare-ups started again. My girlfriend kept moaning about the bites and, now that I’d come to think of it, I was a bit itchy too.
I threw away my mattress and the palettes I’d nabbed from a pub, that I’d been using as a bed, and bought a new one.
Even now, in a new bed and new house, the bedbugs persisted. One of my housemates bought smoke bombs to try and gas them out, but it didn’t work. Each day, when I got home from work, the most common thing I'd find was one of my mates turning his room over, mattress pinned against the wall as he systematically moved along his bed frame popping bugs and eggs with a pen.
At night we would lie awake, wondering if these nocturnal terrors were gnawing on us in that very moment. They feed on blood, can move fast and feast on you while you’re asleep with painless bites, meaning you’re unlikely to notice the bloodletting happening in time to catch them.
By now it was weighing heavy. We were nervous about people coming to the house and were genuinely revolted by the idea of our own beds.
If it happens to you, don't be surprised if you find yourself with the big lights on at 4:30am shining a torch into nooks and crannies you didn't know your bed had in a bid to squash eggs with a pair of tweezers.
"Waking up in the night feeling itchy was the worst because you knew they were biting you," my girlfriend, who astonishingly stayed with me through all of this, said. "I could never get back to sleep those nights, it was awful".
Still, years on, one of my housemates told me as I went to write this piece: "My experience with bed bugs has had a lasting impact on my life. I will never bring trash from the street into my home again."
Exterminators are expensive, but as the months rolled by, eventually we decided to sacrifice huge proportions of our income to end the problem once and for all and splashed out around £400.
It worked, but knowledge of the ease with which they can come back and the phantom feeling of being bitten when your leg itches in the night never goes away.
Maybe it is all just paranoia. Maybe there are no bedbugs in Paris, but rather the anxieties of a post-COVID society still uneasy with its newfound lack of disease. But take it from me, real or not, bedbugs are the true harbingers of paranoia, and if they’ve already got the nation checking their bedsheets and screaming on the tube, then they’ve already won.
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