Here be monsters

Linda Hall

A BRITISH family returned from Lanzarote not long ago complaining that they all came down with food poisoning after eating their hotel buffet’s half­cooked beef.

Worse still, they said, they spotted cockroaches near the outdoor dining area. Undercooked beef? Possibly, as the Spanish happily eat it dripping with blood, but I’m surprised about the cockroaches.

They’re still around but less in evidence than formerly, thanks to town hall fumigation programmes. When I first saw people wearing hazmat suits carrying weird equipment and peering into drains in the small inland city where I now live, I was initially worried, but reassured to learn they were killing off the cockroach population.

That wasn’t the case many years ago when I lived in a semi ­ rural area on the coast and cockroaches were still free to roam, along with rats and snakes.

We lived in the bottom half of a