I have many reasons to be grateful to humans, but they baffle me. They love pandas: and yet they’ve driven pandas close to extinction by destroying the places where they live. They hate us cockroaches: and yet they’ve created an endless series of places where we’re wonderfully at home.
Monday
They give Michelin stars to restaurants. They ought to give ’em Michelin roaches. I live in what I would categorise as a three-roach establishment in London, but I’ll be discreet about the name and address. The restaurateurs live in the happy belief that their kitchen is azoic. Ha!
Tuesday
We love the social life. We live as one of many. We make decisions about food collectively. We are great sharers. Naturally we have an origin myth: a time of innocence when we lived in the open air. We were creatures of the tropical forests before those johnny-come-latelys of evolution started storing food and making restaurants. They might as well have put up a sign: welcome, cockroaches!
Wednesday
It’s as if we’d spent 300m years evolving for the time of the humans. They built a perfect world for us, and, what’s more, they had the kindness to bring us there. We’re not big travellers by nature, but by hitching rides on human transport we’ve reached places far beyond the dreams of our ancestors. Outdoor England is too cold for our tropical nature: but in the warm damp murk of a night-time kitchen we’re more at home than we ever were among the trees.
We’re not what you’d call fussy eaters. That’s how we’ve conquered the world
We’re not what you’d call fussy eaters. That’s how we’ve conquered the world
Thursday
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We’re not what you’d call fussy eaters. That’s how we’ve conquered the world. We can starve for a month and not die. We’ve been known to stay alive by feeding on the gum in a book of stamps. We can live on leather, flakes of human skin, human hair, soiled clothing. Faecal matter makes a pleasant change. Humans are wonderfully generous in the way they squander food and what’s a cockroach supposed to do? Ignore it?
Friday
Service ended in the kitchen round about midnight. They left the place spotless. Or so they told themselves. Perfect work-surfaces, food safely stowed and a floor you could eat off. And we did. We can flatten ourselves into wafers, hide in places you wouldn’t believe were places and find a banquet where humans see sterility. We heard a human footstep and vanished: I can crawl at a foot per second and disappear in the nanosecond between the light switch and the light.
Saturday
We do humans a favour by clearing up their messes. All right, I’ll accept that our presence isn’t wholly benign: we can carry pathogens on our bodies, and our droppings upset asthmatics. But the real danger to humans eating in restaurants comes from sloppy storage and preparation of meat and from dodgy hygiene among the kitchen staff. Every night they go home: and every night in the darkness a shining brown army emerges from the cracks and crevices. Let the banquet begin!
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Oriental cockroach CV
Lifespan A year or so with luck
Eating habits Not ’alf
Hobbies Socialising
Sexual preferences La cucaracha, la cucaracha!
Photograph by Alamy