The mouse has been eating his way through the medicine cabinet to the extent that I am really quite frightened of confronting him.

I opened the cupboard above the sink to find an entire blister pack of paracetamol, several sachets of Solpadeine and some 400mg ibuprofen nibbled away. Also scoffed were two packs of antihistamine, and a packet of high-potency iron tablets.

A plastic bottle of Vitamin D was somehow broken into. And my HRT was missing quite a few days. Holy smoke. What manner of mutant thing had he become?

Or perhaps it was a lady mouse who was going through a hard time and had been fobbed off with a Zoom appointment and cognitive behavioural therapy.

In any case, the mouse has stuffed him- or herself for months with pretty much everything in my kitchen cupboards, from larder supplies to dish cloths, and that was bad enough. But now it had got a liking for the hard stuff, for whatever reason. I wasn’t judging, I just wished there was a way through this that did not involve me going to B&Q.

The day after I found evidence of what surely constituted an overdose, the mouse was still scuffling around in the kitchen in broad daylight while I cowered in the living room next door. Desperate to get his paws on more, he was scratching at the back of the kitchen cabinets, trying to break through the backing and make more entry holes after I blocked the other ones up with bits of wood and gaffer tape.

I sat at my desk in the room next to the kitchen, a study come snug, where I was trying to type an email, and I froze. Listening to what I presumed was a monster mouse, I decided something had to change. I could no longer entertain these deluded Surrey ideas about putting food out of reach and politely encouraging my rodent house guest to consider moving out.

Everything the builder boyfriend has done to thwart him has failed. He blocked off the larder shelves with anti-climbing mouse guards made from cardboard. He went down into the cellar and crawled under the house and shouted: ‘There’s a rodent superhighway down here! No wonder we’ve got mice! There’s about 17 bricks missing in the party wall!’ He worked himself into a frenzy with a far-fetched theory that a neighbour had knocked them out in order to vent their boiler room.

After hours of bricklaying on his stomach in the crawl space, lavishly swearing, he declared the house closed to mousery. And that night mousey came as usual and helped himself to Benadryl. (Although, to be fair, the pollen count was high that day.)

I got an old cat carrier and propped the lid open. Inside I placed seeded bread, a handful of muesli, some granola and a carrot.

I thought about putting a packet of anti-inflammatories in there, maybe a bowl of cough mixture, but I decided I would play it straight. If mousey wanted to get high, he could do it on his own time. I was not encouraging it.

I tied the lid to a bean pole which I propped on the edge of the ascending kitchen stairs and figured that if I sat crouched in the upper ground floor sitting room all night I could push the lid shut with a flick of the pole.

The only problem was that at 10 p.m. I fell asleep. But the next evening, the builder boyfriend came home with a present. ‘Mrs Andrewes has sent you this,’ he announced, placing a proper humane mouse catcher cage down in front of me.

Mrs Andrewes once told the builder boyfriend, after he had done work for her for years: ‘You know, there’s a builder just like you in a column I read.’

I told him to thank her for me very much, and I set it excitedly. It had a little trap door which propped open attached to a long pin mechanism attached to a plate. I placed the bread on the plate and when the mouse came in and trod on it that would release the pin holding the trap door open, and it would then slam shut.

We set the trap with the pin propped as precariously close to the edge as possible, so that the slightest pressure on the plate would trigger it.

I went to bed quite nervous about what I would catch. The next morning I came down sleepy, forgetting for a moment, and then gasped as I realised. The food had been eaten. The trap door was firmly closed. But where was the mouse? The pill-popping rodent had apparently managed to eat the goodies while avoiding the spring plate, then, perhaps for a laugh, he closed the trap door as he left.