Ever had a mouse in your house? Most of us have at one time or another, and this week’s feature brought many a dark memory flooding back for me.

Many of these are in the student era archive, when two of my less-than-lovely London house-shares came complete with furry freeloaders.

Nothing says 'home sweet home' like opening the grill to find an over-confident mouse staring back at you. We've all been there, right? Okay, maybe not.

Arguably the most horrific thing of all about this - frankly, rank - memory is that I don't recall any of us avoiding using the grill or even giving it a good clean. We just carried on cooking endless garlic bread on it, albeit on new sheets of tin foil. Students, eh?

The only mice I've had in any of my Hertfordshire homes came in courtesy of my cats in their younger days. More than one had to be released into the garden in the early hours of the morning after almost coming a cropper.

These days, with a doddery dog and the same two cats now well into their twilight years, the midnight mousing is no more. At least, we've never seen any evidence of it. Or maybe it's the kids that are keeping the mice at bay?

Either way, I can enjoy grilling stuff without having to fret about whether it'll be coming with an added sprinkling of droppings or moulted mouse fur.

Things have been a bit different on the work front, however. Recently, our office played host to a family of mice; the unease of turning around and seeing one dart off, out of sight - very possibly into the big pack of tea bags - was as alarming as ever.

He or she had brought a crew of high speed friends and they enjoyed brazenly mucking about together in our meeting room.

They're gone now. Whether the pest controller worked his magic is unclear - another theory is that the whole crew hitched a lift out in a bulging bin bag. I hope they're happy and not dead. But mainly I hope they're a very long way from my oven.