The Enforcer

In fact, if you are in any way squeamish, look away now. It takes a unique, and strongstomached, kind of person to work as a pest controller.

Along with the rats, cockroaches, bed bugs and wasps you would expect them to deal with, there is a host of other grim tasks they regularly confront in the line of duty.

There are the "dirty protests" in city tower block stairwells to clean away, discarded syringes to pick up and the body fluids left behind when people die to disinfect.

The fact that Southampton pest controller Justin Crow does all this with a permanent smile is pretty amazing.

"There is so much stuff we do," he enthuses, as we drive around the city in his white van. "At certain times of year we might get a spate of cockroaches and in the summer we get a lot of bee swarms and wasp nests. Next week we could get a spate of bed bugs. Week to week it's unpredictable.

That's why I enjoy the job so much."

Unfortunately, on a morning spent with the 35-year-old city council employee, I find it hard to share in Justin's zeal.

Embarrassingly, I shriek a little when we find a dead rat in some shrubbery, and I decide to hang back when he goes into a flat where an elderly man died in the bath the previous week to assess how much body fluid needs to be cleaned up.

While it's all pretty hideous for an outsider like me, my time spent with Justin is also a fascinating insight into Southampton's life of grime - a real eye-opener.

He is open and honest about his work, and full of anecdotes about the gruesome and grisly sights he has seen during his 13-year career in the city.

Toe-curlingly terrifying for large sections of the population, Justin spends much of his life working with rats.

The revelation that they are "getting bigger and living longer" will be no comfort to rodent phobes.

Justin has a number of jobs on today - most of them dealing with long-running rat problems.

"The rat man's come!" says an elderly woman's next-door neighbour as we pull up at the first stop of the day.

Her home riddled with rodent droppings, Justin is pretty sure the pensioner's problem is a result of faulty drainage.

The creatures are getting through breaks in the pipes to enter her house.

Looking down the drain in her front garden, Justin, who is now sporting blue rubber gloves, tells me matter-of-factly that rats don't usually like going through U-bends, but on occasion they have been known to come up through people's toilets.

In fact a man from St Mary's phoned them with exactly that problem last year, he says as I recoil in horror, making a silent pledge to myself to always close the toilet lid in future.

One of our next stops is East Park, behind the old Tyrrell & Green building.

The city's parks are a favourite hangout for rats, and therefore a "hotspot" area for the pest control team.

"We are still seeing large populations of rats around various areas of the city," explains Justin.

"We work very hard trying to keep them at bay in the parks, but we treat one area and find they pop up in another. They keep us on our toes. There is always so much food about, especially over the weekend when people are out clubbing."

The biggest rat he has ever seen was the size of a small dog, he says, holding his hands wide apart by way of illustration.

"We are not here to rid the world of rats but to address the balance.

"We are very conscious of the potential for disease, especially if they come from the sewers.

You can picture what's down there."

It is all quite grim. But it gets even worse when you look skyward.

"Pigeons carry more diseases than rats, believe it or not," he says authoritatively.

"We get called to more and more pigeon problems now. It's a big issue."

Equipped with air rifles, the team conduct regular pigeon shoots (in areas like shopping centre service bays and multistorey car parks) to reduce the amount of mess they leave.

"You have to take into account where they are going to fall.

The last thing you want them to do is fall onto an air conditioning duct and then start bleeding.

"You have to make sure it's a clear shot and also that they don't have young."

Shooting is also seen as the most humane way to kill rats now. Gone are the days when splatting them was the favoured option.

Justin is regularly called to city tower blocks to clean and proof balconies - a favourite spot for pigeon target practice.

"People often clean the mess themselves but they don't appreciate that when you breathe in the fumes, it doesn't come out of your chest," says Justin, dressed in his regulation blue fleece and black trousers. "It contains a lot of mites and diseases."

Shuddering, he adds: "I have seen pigeon mess as thick as five inches on balconies."

Rats and pigeons aside, the worst thing to get is definitely bed bugs, the dad-of-one insists.

"They are a growing menace and are difficult to treat,"

Justin says. "They get into all the nooks and crannies so to do a proper fumigation the property has to be cleared."

The beasts have increased with the rise in foreign holidays, with tourists bringing them back as unwelcome souvenirs.

"We recently had a cruise ship come in that had bed bugs on it. It is a real dilemma for the cruise industry - they will probably deny it though.

"There is such a flow of people and you can't control it. It gets in their luggage as well. You get it in places like hotels or backpacker places too. Bed bugs get moved around the world.

"You do get it bad in the poorer areas, where there are more hygiene problems, but you still get them in the cleanest of places."

The worst case of bed bugs he has ever seen involved an elderly couple who were literally covered with the parasites.

"They were all over their clothes, all over their walls and the wife had got badly infected leg bites," says Justin, shaking his head. "It was teeming with bed bugs.

"The treatment was successful that time, but the problem with bed bugs, especially in smaller cases, is that you need them to feed on people, otherwise they can go dormant for up to a year.

"It's a horrifying thought for people but they have to still sleep in their bed for the bugs to come out and be treated. They need to carry on getting bitten.

"Bed bugs are another big health concern and they are on the increase.

When I first started we got a few cases but now there doesn't seem to be a week go by when we don't get cases coming in, especially in blocks of flats."

It is not uncommon for the team to be sent live bed bugs through the post or for an itchy resident to drop some into their office for identification.

"We say to people they have to be in a sealed jar, but what is common sense to us isn't necessarily common sense to someone else,"

he adds.

The saddest case Justin has ever come across was when he was called upon to clean up some body fluids.

"The body was found six months later and there were flies everywhere. The smell was unbelievable, as you can imagine, because it was rotting. There was a lot of fluid. The sad thing was that there were family photographs all around but he lived on his own and nobody had missed him."

So what is the all-time worst thing he has ever encountered?

Waiting for an answer, I brace myself, knowing it is going to be bad. "We got called once to an old chap in Midanbury.

"He was in his 80s or 90s. At the bottom of his garden was a big chest freezer full of pheasants, but it had been turned off for about a year. The contents had rotted and solidified. We had to dig a pit in the garden and bury it. It was the worst smell I have ever come across."

We're now at a block of flats in Bevois Valley, and Justin has found a dead rat poisoned in one of his traps.

He retrieves the creature triumphantly with a huge pair of forceps, despite admitting "it's only a small one".

After washing his hands in a sink in the back of his van, we continue our journey with an additional passenger on board.

Back on the road he tells me what to do if I ever confront a squirrel in an attic.

"The last thing you want to do is corner a squirrel up there. It can be nasty and it will attack you."

The things you learn on a day out with a pest control officer.