There are rats in my attic. Should I live and let live?

Ihave rats tap dancing in my roof. It starts off with a few small shuffles and pick ups and, before you know it, it’s the opening number to 42nd Street. God only knows how many are up there, but boy do they like to dance.

They are stuck in the bit of the roof above where I write. In the summer months, they are asleep when I work, but now that the nights have drawn in I get to listen to their warmup numbers just as I finish my day.

Getting to them requires crawling through an incredibly small hatch, but that is not the only reason I have never been into our attic. This house has had some pretty … let’s just say interesting tenants in the past and I have a persistent worry that there is something up there other than rats. On both accounts, I have been putting off the problem of what is above my head.

I have been bitten by a rat in the past. I mistakenly put my hand on one in the chicken coop when looking inside the nest box. It was soft, warm and bit me very hard. In surprise and fear, my response was to squeeze harder. We were locked in this clamp until I came to my senses and whacked it on a nearby tree trunk. That made it really mad and it jumped up and down to let me know.

What was more terrifying, in retrospect, was the injection for rabies and tetanus that I had to get in A&E. It was a Victorian-looking thing with a huge glass vial and, as I remember it, a 10in syringe that they stick in your backside. Oh, rats.

For weeks, I have been going round and round this issue. I could lay snap traps – but when they don’t kill outright, it’s brutal. I will spare you the details. My neighbour Rhian lent me her humane trap. I have used these before, but, quite rightly, the rats don’t take to being trapped and they do that jumping thing, so I don’t fancy trying to get one