In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’

‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.’ 1984 by George Orwell

In Room 101* the character’s of George Orwell’s jolly satire of life in 1948 are subjected to their worst fears as a form of torture. For Winston Smith it is rats. It’s a fear that a lot of us share.

Robert Sullivan spent a lot of nights here in Eden's Alley looking at rats, despite his own nervousness about the animal.   They were here, they're probably still here, but the morning I went there was no sign of them.  What I took away from Robert Sullivan's book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, which is informative and entertaining, though,  is that rats are pretty much anywhere that humans are.   But they're good at hiding.

*Rm. 101 factoid: Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash, pub-rock band was called The 101ers.