moth attack

We have an outbreak of clothes moth.  Or to be accurate, at this stage the Systems Administrator has an outbreak of clothes moth, but I have no reason to believe that the moths will confine themselves to the SA's wardrobe.  I noticed one day that one of the SA's sweaters was peppered with holes.  The SA insisted that the damage had happened ages ago, but I was not convinced that the moths, having found a cosy berth in somebody's wardrobe, would have left of their own accord.

Fortunately, when I looked at my own small but cherished collection of alpaca and other luxury knits, the moths hadn't yet made it to my side of the room.  I have had some of those sweaters for fifteen years.  They are beyond fashion, and I fully intend them to last me for the rest of my natural days. I stocked up in a panic on lavender scented insecticide sachets from Tesco, which was all that Tesco seemed to offer in the way of moth treatment, searched the John Lewis website in vain, and struck gold with Robert Dyas.  Robert Dyas online customers obviously suffer from clothes moth big time, and I was able to equip myself with more cedar wood balls and cedar rings for slipping over the necks of my coat hangers, plus slow release orange, unscented, insecticide impregnated spheres, which will apparently turn white when they have run out of juice, more hanging insecticide tabs, some poisoned paper (not sure why I ordered that) and a can of spray.

I put a slightly random assortment of repellents and poisons in every drawer and cupboard, and gave them all a squirt of spray for good measure.  I don't greatly like using insecticide in the house, but we have done in the past, faced with flea outbreaks, and I like the idea of having to throw out most of my clothes even less.  As a natural fibre enthusiast I only possess five garments, at an outside estimate, that are not liable to be eaten by moths, and two of those are anoraks.

The SA's wardrobe still worried me.  We must be in the minority among English (or Western) couples in that I do not buy the SA's clothes.  I do not organise the SA's clothes.  Autonomous adults are in charge of their own clothes, and beyond making encouraging noises about how nice the SA's linen suit looks, and more generally what excellent taste in indigo workwear Monty Don possesses, I do not interfere.  But faced with the moth outbreak I could no longer view the dense piles of randomly mixed clothing in the SA's wardrobe with equanimity.  Spraying the front face of the wall of garments with insecticide was not enough.

I did ask permission to excavate the wardrobe, to be polite, though I fear it was a face saving exercise for both of us.  In the circumstances, a refusal to let me take everything out of the wardrobe and sort through it for moth holes would have gone down about as well as a farmer suggesting to the Man from the Ministry that he'd rather not have his cattle tested for foot and mouth in the middle of a foot and mouth outbreak, thank you very much.

I was justified in my suspicions.  There were quite a few holey sweaters in there, which are now all in black dustbin bags waiting to go to the dump.  Moths seem to prefer finer grade V neck pullovers, of the type you could wear under a jacket, over chunky knits, but to my irritation they had eaten a hole in the middle of the stomach of a rather good Scandi knit that was a present from me, long before Scandinavian noir became trendy.  Also they do not eat acrylic.  I was sorely tempted to add the acrylic jumpers I found to the contents of the bin bags, but remembered the autonomy of the individual and folded them up and put them away again.  All the knitwear that survived is now headed for the wash, though the hand wash only pile will take a while to get through, owing to lack of drying space.

The great wardrobe investigation also demonstrated that the SA possesses, at a conservative estimate, over three dozen pairs of mostly shabby cotton trousers, of which approximately two and a half dozen have probably not made it out of the wardrobe in the past decade.  The SA has offered to sort through these himself.

I, meanwhile, have just remembered that I have a genuine mid 1980s (and therefore vintage) Katherine Hamnett riding jacket in pure wool, soft red, with a red silk lining, and cuffs with real buttonholes, hanging in the spare bedroom wardrobe.  Time to apply another liberal dose of insecticide.