Cockroaches - Cunning or Critter?

This last weekend I was enjoying the sun in Chris and Amanda Cowley's (of RedPR) back garden, and the subject of cockroaches came up. I know that this is not a normal conversation over tea, but our conversation wasn't normal anyway. It was geared around Africa and other exotic destinations. Chris had mentioned that whilst he was overseas, a cockroach had crawled over his face, and he had waited in James Bond style whilst this cockroach moved on before he could take his shoe to the little critter.

I feel as if I am quite well versed on the subject of cockroaches and happily recalled the time that I had spent many a night squashing cockroaches in a seedy youth hostel bathroom in King's Cross, Sydney. Little did I know at the time, that if the cockroach is female, the eggs are jettisoned and can hatch at a later date. In order to prevent a massive infestation the best thing to do is to cover the whole place with bleach to prevent cockroach world domination. I didn't know this at the time, and we narrowly escaped a cockroach coup.

I do feel a bit of an expert on cockroaches, partly because I've spent a lot of my life in areas where there are vast populations of the critters and partly because I have spent many an hour reading up about them. I have to say, for my defence, that the reading up about them was because I had nothing else to read. Whilst I was living in Vanuatu I found a bookshop which had three English books in its, the rest were all in French. I am a bit of a bookworm and was delighted to find an alternative to the books that I'd been rereading. These were "The Three Musketeers", "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Laboratory Experiments on Cockroaches".

The book on experiments on cockroaches proved to be quite fascinating, as well as rather macabre. For instance, did you know that you can freeze a cockroach in a tub of water, defrost it, and it will carry on as if nothing has ever happened to it? Cockroaches can also survive a vacuum (for a very short space of time), will continue to move for a number of days once decapitated, can survive high voltage electrocution and are one of the few animals on earth that could survive a nuclear holocaust. Now that certainly has to show something cunning about these creepy crawlies.

I personally do not like them, they resemble something out of the Alien films, but you do have to give them their due. They have managed to survive in a number environments and I suspect there is a master plan to conquer the world.

They are nasty little critters, in my mind, but I am sure they have a 'cunning plan'. Beware.