There are moments in life when a man must stand and defend his home.

The Battle of Britain.

Rorke's Drift.

The Alamo.

And now, apparently, my house in Cyprus.

The enemy?

Centipedes.

Not one or two centipedes, you understand. Not the occasional wandering specimen looking for directions to the bathroom.

Oh no. I appear to be under siege.

Every morning I wake up and make my coffee and discover another dozen of them clinging to the stone walls inside my house like tiny alien invaders preparing for an assault.

At first, I adopted a policy of peaceful coexistence. After all, they were here first. Or at least they probably think they were.

I nod politely to them. Ask them how things are, and they obviously ignored me.

I wished them a pleasant day and they continued to multiply.

Soon, however, I noticed a disturbing trend.

The number of centipedes seemed to be increasing at a rate usually associated with government spending or rabbits.

A little research revealed the horrifying truth. A female centipede can lay around thirty eggs.

Thirty! One female.

Suddenly the mathematics became terrifying. If there were two females, that was sixty. Four females, one hundred and twenty.

Eight females could produce enough centipedes to invade a small European nation or Donald Trump.

Action was required.

Armed with a plastic scraper and a determination normally reserved for medieval crusaders, I began removing them from the walls.

Now, before anyone writes to complain, I wasn't killing them. I was merely relocating them. Specifically, into the neighbouring garden. I like to think of it as a wildlife conservation programme. My neighbours may see it differently.

Still, every morning I scraped another collection of centipedes from the walls and gently released them over the fence. After a few weeks I estimated I had relocated at least sixty. Possibly more.

The trouble with centipedes is they all look vaguely similar, so it's difficult to tell whether you've already met one before.

Then a worrying thought occurred to me. What if all sixty were the children of the same mother?

At that point I began to picture a giant centipede somewhere beneath the house.

A matriarch. A queen. A creature of such enormous size that passing aircraft report turbulence.

Every day she waits.

Watching.

Counting.

"Thirty-two."

"Thirty-three."

"Thirty-four."

And then one morning she discovers her offspring are missing.

I imagine her reaction will be measured and reasonable.

Something along the lines of:

"WHO HAS BEEN TOUCHING MY CHILDREN?"

The next thing I know, a six-metre-long centipede will rise over the garden wall like a scene from a Japanese monster film.

The neighbours will point, and shout, ' Se exypireteí sostá,' because my neighbours are Cypriots.

My dog, Max, will run for cover.

And I will be standing there holding a plastic scraper and wondering whether this is the moment I should have invested in a flamethrower.

Of course, there is another possibility. Perhaps the centipedes are communicating. Perhaps every individual I have relocated has eventually made its way back and reported my actions. Perhaps, even now, secret meetings are taking place behind the water tank. Tiny centipede generals gathered around a map.

"Right. Tonight we take the patio."

"Tomorrow the kitchen."

"Then we move on the bedroom."

I don't know what the answer is.

All I know is that every morning I continue my battle.

Box in one hand. Plastic scraper in the other. Defender of the realm. Protector of the stone walls. And sworn enemy of the Cyprus Centipede.

At least until I finally meet their mother.

If that happens and this blog suddenly stops updating, please send help.

Or a very large bird.

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