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I don’t remember the flat in Walmer Crescent, in that now-very-nearly-genteel Greek Thomson curve off Paisley Road West that was dad and mum’s first home in Glasgow. It would have been crumbling and smoke-blackened in the late 1950s, and the apartment was a grace-and-favour attachment to the dental surgery dad worked in. I know it was infested with vermin, and that mum acquired an orange cat to battle the Cessnock rodents. I don’t think the colour was significant, even in the vicinity of Ibrox.

I do remember that cat. In fact it’s my earliest memory: the pre-toddler embracing of a cuddly, furry teddy-bear-substitute, only to be rewarded with excruciating pain as it sank its claws into my tender skin.

Shortly afterwards, we moved to Shawlands, dad opening his own practice in one room at 1425 Pollokshaws Road (still there, and still a dental surgery). We lived in the rest of that old house, battling the cold with coal that arrived, terrifyingly, through a hatch, blackened men emptying sacks down a chute with an enormous rattling roar. Winter smogs and Vicks poultices for green-snot-infested chests were universal. Windows were ice-caked on the inside on many winter mornings. There were still trams in the street and steam engines on the railway next door.

The kitchen was down steps and to the back, and mum had a stainless steel sink installed as part of the drive to modernity that would eventually take us to an Americanised 60s house in Troon, on the Ayrshire coast. The sink was mounted in a veneered unit with doors that opened into a dark jungley jumble of buckets, less than fragrant cloths, bottles and tins of chemically-stinking fluids. Ajax powder in a cardboard tube. Poisonous things. Do. Not. Eat.  It was a terrifying place that gradually accrued more and more kitchen-and- cleaning related objects and substances of uncertain and dangerous provenance. “Just put it under the sink” mum would say. Or “I think it’s under the sink.” There were pipes down there, copper brazed onto lead, because the intestines of the house were ancient, plumbing that flaked bits of toxic metal into the water. You had to run the taps every morning until the water was clear. How that affected the dental practice I don’t know. “Rinse!” Those were the days, dad told me, when dentists would test mercury and silver amalgam fillings by rolling them between thumb and forefinger. When dad died he left a large lump of scrap mercury and silver amalgam in his garage, always claiming it was worth a fortune. It cost a fortune to have it disposed of.

Sisters arrived. We played in the fearsome cellar, the slimy Anderson Shelter, but shunned Under The Sink. It was like the anti-Narnia. Maybe we hid in mothballed  wardrobes, hoping for tea with Mr Tumnus, but no hide-and-seek ever involved subterranean delving beneath the basin.

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This week I have been under the sink with a vengeance. Attempts to revive a dying dishwasher (a machine, not some enslaved human)meant disconnecting plastic-on-plastic pipes that could only be accessed underneath our cool ceramic kitchen basin. Where I discovered a morass of suppurating horror amid the endless bottles of Flash, dog shampoo, Dettol, Brasso, saddle soap, Nikwax, rusting Brillo pads and whatever Pink Stuff actually is. 

Who knew that mouse-droppings, when wet, expand into raisin-like globules of science fiction filth? We battle field mice every year about this time, but it was only on removing the cloths, brushes, old pots, bicycle repair kits, Mole wrenches, cable ties, elastic ropes and useless Vacuvin wine-preservers that the full excremental horror became damply obvious. Because that U-bend had been leaking, too. “Just put it under the sink” had become a curse reverberating into prophecy.

Rubber gloves, a Covid mask against mice infections: this is how pandemics start. Under the sink I went, head first, bagging and binning, scrubbing and disinfecting, partly out of shame as by now I knew the excellent local firm of George Robertsons were going to have to come and install a new dishwasher. They would presumably be used to going Under Sinks. But not battling a seething mass of mutated mouse shit.

Maybe we should get a cat. Any colour. But ever since the death of the last two (one stepped on by a pregnant wife, the other suffocated by a dozing St Bernard) felines have not ventured into The Manse.

Anyway, traps are set and the sink unit is secure, dry, clean and tidy, awaiting the connection of the new Bosch dishwasher. Mutton fat killed the old one after six frequently-sulky years.

Time for a reviving glass of Côtes de Rhone (Co-op, £6.95, bargain). All I need’s a corkscrew. But where could it be?

No…