We’ve got mice. We’ve got mice on the inside. A mouse on the outside is a friend of David Attenborough, an infinitely miraculous and fascinating link in a complex and breathtaking ecosystem. A mouse on the inside is home herpes. We’ve got a mouse on the inside. A mouse is a stylistic invention, a literary conceit. You can write “a mouse”, you can say “a mouse”, you can imagine a mouse – you can imagine a mouse playing the ukulele or driving a small train, wearing a monocle – but in the real world, there is no such thing as a mouse. There are only mice. You might notice a mouse going about his busy business on the carpet, but it is only the tip of the miceberg.

And where you find mice, you also find Rentokil. I don’t know which is worse: mouse, or Stanley from Rentokil. “Hi, I’m Stanley from Rentokil,” he said. He said it on the outside. On the inside, he was saying: “Hi, I’m Dirty Harry. Make my day, furry bitch.” Nobody leaves school and says to the careers person (a teacher too fat and stupid to teach gym): “Thank you for the 14 years of full-time education – I’m off to join Rentokil.” But plenty of kids leave school at eight knowing that they want to be the Men in Black. They naturally slip into pest control as the closest legal alternative to whacking extraterrestrials.

So, Stanley Die Hard cased the house, sucked his teeth in the manner of an Acton Tommy Lee Jones and told the Blonde she was living on a midden of hairy pestilence, that the kitchen was the Petri dish of a new Black Death, that mouse urine contained all the ingredients for the pustular, bloody, vomiting end of life as we know it, but not to worry. He could sort it. For the price of a term’s school fees or a short skiing holiday in Gstaad, he would do it all without unsightly, embarrassing or smelly corpses. He said we should block their holes with wire wool. I can see that would be effective, but isn’t it fiddly and rather cruel?

“Not their holes; their other holes.” Other holes?

“Yes, the holes they use.” Use for what?

“Ignore him,” said the Blonde.

“There is this new solution we have,” Stanley said silkily. “It works with state-of-the-art techno-stuff. You don’t need to worry your pretty little heads. The problem steps inside the box, and a measured dose of gas is administered – silent, efficient, keen. And we take them away.”

I’m sorry. Run that past me again. You’re going to put a dozen Hornby Dublo gas chambers in my house?

“Well, technically, they’re . . .” Technically, they’re Mauschwitz.

It was too creepy. Confronted by this Cruella de Vil played by Ralph Fiennes, I found my inner Mouskar Schindler and decided to kill them the painful, old-fashioned, screaming, democratic way. Then the Blonde discovered the sticky paper.

Once in a generation, an invention comes that is so brilliant, so farsighted, so utterly right, it changes the world and makes you believe that the future will be a sunny, happy and civilised place. Sticky-backed mouse mats are pure genius. You peel off the paper and lay them like solitaire aces around the house and garden, and, in the morning, there are mice, glued in comically balletic positions. But you have to get there before the dog. If you don’t, you have mouse stuck to mat stuck to jack russell face. It’s like the Tar Baby – both funny and disgusting. Then you just pop them in the bin, except, of course, you can’t dump a live mouse embossed on cardboard into the recycle bin bag. The Blonde said: “Best to fold them in half and hit them hard with a frying pan.” Sometimes it’s useful having a South African round the house.

Stanley left us with a small dilemma: through the letter box, he shouted, “You’ve two sorts of mice: town mice and field mice.” Oh, no, not field mice! Town mice are a pest infestation; country mice are a fairy story. I blame unrestricted immigration. They’re obviously economic migrants, imported to the town to be sex slaves and waiters. The Blonde says she thinks we’ve got Polish mice as well. There are droppings under the sink, and they’ve started grouting the tiles.

St Peter’s Square is one of those surprisingly expansive corners of the suburban city that squats between the motorway west and Chiswick High Road. It is a showy moment of aspirational Victorian villa life plopped among the terraces, the skilled tradesmen’s cottages. But it isn’t anything like as surprising as the Carpenter’s Arms, on the corner, a lost pub of the type that is now useful only as a spivvy conversion to studio flats. It’s a long, plain room with a bit of a courtyard out the back, and doesn’t make any effort to be anything other than a down-on-its-luck backstreet boozer. Philippa, who lives round the corner, said we should try the food. The menu is English, in the current genre of robust and enthusiastic use of interesting ingredients and cheaper cuts. The starters include leek and potato soup with oysters, sauté of smoked eel, chanterelle and jerusalem artichokes, steamed razor clams with parsley, garlic and cream, quail with grapes and braised bacon, chicory and mustard. For main courses, you can have a hot salt-beef sandwich with beetroot and pickles, a proper poacher’s pie, bream with octopus and butternut squash, bits of beef, a Tamworth pork chop or duck-fat oven chips with roast garlic and foie-gras mayonnaise. Altogether, that’s a pretty good spread for a pub. It’s not pretentious or weird, it’s not got a concept, it’s just bloody brilliant.

I’ve eaten here twice. The first time, I had a mutton soup that left me speechless with admiration; each time, every dish has been faultless. The room is plain, quiet and relaxed. The grub is served by a pretty, quiet and relaxed waitress who knows what’s what. It comes on plates that are round and white, with cutlery that does what it’s told. And it comes without ta-ra, falderal or soliloquy. It’s honest, accomplished and confident, full of its own flavour, and as well made as a grandfather clock. I could now go on to sauce each dish with metaphor and simile, I could garnish it all with alliteration and allegory, serve it up to you on napery of verbiage, but I shan’t. Simply and truly, this is a kitchen that wholly succeeds in doing what it sets out to do, in a room that is gently hospitable, without assumption or pretension. It is as fine and joyous a lunch as you will find the length and breadth of Britain this week.

91 Black Lion Lane, W6; 0871 703 2881.
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm, Sat, Sun, 12.30pm-4pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 7pm-10pm (Sun 9.30pm)

5 stars: Mighty Mouse; 4 stars: Squeaky clean; 3 stars: Cheesy; 2 stars: Mousy; 1 star: Taking the Mickey

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