I’ve spent so much of my adult life terrified of getting bedbugs,” says Rosie, who lives in a rented flat in Wood Green, north London. “Then one day I saw one crawling on the bed. About the size of a sprinkle on a doughnut — big enough to see. After that I lost my mind, turning the place upside down.” She immediately threw away her bedroom rug, stripped the bed, hoovered the mattress and blasted it with a clothes steamer.
“I started calling pest control companies and they were all booked up,” she says. “I had to bargain with them. I paid extra to have somebody come out of hours because I was at work. In the meantime I was so agitated. I was thinking,