Don’t be bugged by these encroachers

Cockroaches in London have the good grace to keep out of sight. Usually. So I was a bit taken aback to spot one taking the air the other day and it occurred to me that because they keep such a low profile in this town, I don't know much about them. It's different in Cairo, where you become intimately acquainted with the cockroach life cycle in no time.

British cockroaches are petite, casual, debonair; Egyptian roaches are the size of bull terriers, more in your face, often literally. I've never seen a cockroach in a private home in London but I shared flats with two varieties in Cairo and Alexandria: the toffee-coloured, scarab-shaped Egyptian and the spherical, tortoiseshell American version.

The Egyptian is smarter. If you pour a bowlful of the local sawdust muesli, add milk, then pop to the bathroom, a pair of feelers will be waving at you from inside the bowl on your return. The Egyptian also survives inside the fridge for days on end, cunningly camouflaged in fresh vegetables. The American isn't speedy enough to share your food and you don't see it so often. I daresay it spends its days fomenting regime change in the Middle East.

No matter how often I sprayed these bugs, I never found any corpses. It took me six months to twig that the Arabic script on the aerosol can under the sink was instructions on how to starch shirts, not kill cockroaches. I hadn't been nuking the little buggers so much as stiffening their resolve.

I rub along quite amiably with most insects so it was a bit of a downer in Egypt to have my adolescent impression of cockroaches, formed by reading Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel stories, overturned. For those who don't know, Archy was a cockroach with the soul of a poet who hung out in a downtown Manhattan newspaper office, living off leftover cheese sandwiches.

After the humans had decamped for the day he would sit on a typewriter in the company of Mehitabel, a flighty alley cat, and compose exquisite free verse. Except, being a cockroach, Archy couldn't use the heavy shift key, so all his poetry, like that of ee cummings, was lower-case.

Apart from Roy Hattersley and I, not many people do know Archy and Mehitabel nowadays, which is a crying shame. Archy was the embodiment of all that was decent in a cockroach. Egyptian bugs may lack his sensibility but I prefer to believe that London roaches are made of finer stuff. They keep a low profile and get on with polishing their poetry.

And before I forget: the cockroach I saw recently was Nowhere Near Food, I promise. Next week: The brown rat - friend or foe?