But there are advantages.

There's a reduced risk of burglary and perhaps, depending on location, the possibility of a panoramic view and even the likelihood of an extra splash of sunshine when the weather obliges.

Up until now I've slept comfortably at night, confident of an additional advantage . . . that my second-floor location guaranteed immunity from nocturnal visits by small, furry, long-tailed creatures.

Not so: height, I now realise, is no obstacle to mice. In fact I suspect the tiny rodents enjoy the challenge a steep climb presents. Certainly there was nothing in the exuberant demeanour of the two creatures I spotted around midnight two weeks ago, negotiating my tiled kitchen floor at breakneck speed, to suggest the journey up to my apartment had depleted their stamina.

Having mice in your home is unhygienic. But I don't find the creatures objectionable enough to feel comfortable killing them.

And so my first instinct was to rodent-proof the apartment by blocking every potential entry. This I soon discovered to be impossible, with too many confined spaces aggravating my dodgy back, and some of them maddeningly inaccessible.

When a friend informed me that mice can squeeze through a space as small as the circumference of a biro, I acknowledged the futility of that strategy.

Acquiring a cat on the understanding that he earn his keep might, I decided, be the simplest solution.

But incarcerating a cat in a second-floor apartment when I'm out most of the day could itself be construed as cruelty. So the Natural Born Killer Option had to be excluded.

A baited snap trap is the traditional way to catch mice. But I can never look at one of those without recalling one schoolboy attempt to catch a mouse that backfired badly. I remember waking in the dead of night to the highpitched screech of a distressed creature and finding an injured mouse on our kitchen floor, its tail caught in the trap I'd laid earlier. I released that mouse to fight another day and I haven't handled a snap trap since.

I've seen adverts for plugin ultrasonic devices which dissuade rodents from entering your home but I'm not convinced that something with that kind of invisible but devastating effect might not have some unforeseen cerebral consequences for the legal occupant too. My local hardware shop doesn't stock them anyway. Instead they tried to interest me in a glue trap, a device so cruel I contacted the DSPCA about them.

"Glue traps are legal and absolutely objectionable, " said the society's education officer, Gillian Bird.

"Sometimes, because the trapped mouse is intent on escape, you wake up to a couple of limbs left stuck in a bed of glue."

"If there's nothing for mice to eat, " Gillian pointed out reasonably, "they'll soon move elsewhere."

These days I keep my apartment surgically clean.

There isn't a crumb of food in evidence. I haven't seen or heard a mouse for over a week. Fingers crossed. . . .