The pest I’ll never forget: I turned the toaster upside down. A mouse fell out

We tried humane traps, wire wool, hardcore cleaning regimes. Nothing worked. In the end, I wondered if the mice in our house were the real residents, while we were the intruders Some of the happiest years of my 20s were spent in a house-share in east London. Four of us were crammed into a three-bedroom terrace where the dining room had been turned into a bedroom. My housemates were my closest friends.

We were young women with the kind of intense-bordering-on-codependent dynamic that becomes unsustainable later in life, when you have long-term partners, pets and children. We lived together, we went out together, in the summer we took our Argos tent to festivals together. We stayed up late discussing love-life and work dilemmas, often crowding round a phone to draft text messages. We were also not particularly clean, which meant our cluttered, chaotic house was the ideal home for mice. At first we told ourselves it was just one mouse we saw running along next to the skirting board or darting behind a…