Have you ever woken up covered in blood?

No? Then you never lived in Russia at the time I did. Then and there such sanguinary awakenings were a routine matter every morning.

You may think my hometown was plagued by nocturnal violence, with some members of the family assailing their somnolent relations, but that wasn’t the case. Moscow was plagued all right, but not by domestic violence. It was catastrophically infested with bedbugs.

Those bloody pests figure in both English and Russian folklore, but note both the similarity and the difference. The two nations refer to the same problem, but the Russians merely established its aetiology, while the pragmatic English offered a concrete solution.

The English reference to that fauna appears in a good-natured nursery rhyme:

Good night, sleep tight
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
But if they do, then take your shoe and
Hit them till they’re black and blue

The first two lines have become proverbial, the way many people wish good night to one another even if they’ve never heard of anyone actually bitten by those nasty creatures. As to the proposed remedy, it strikes me as effective but only of limited practical value.

You see, bedbugs strike mostly at night, and their bites are seldom painful enough to wake one up. When a victim opens his eyes in the morning, the bedbugs are usually sleeping off their blood hangover away from both prying eyes and punitive footwear.

However, if you do hit one with a shoe, my experience suggests it doesn’t turn black and blue. It turns into a red blot, which shows how little exposure to bedbugs Britons had when they came up with that rhyme.

On the other hand, Muscovites responded to the pestilence the way they responded to communist propaganda: with a joke. That one targeted both nuisances: “What do bedbugs have in common with capitalists? They both suck the blood of the working classes.”

For all the much-vaunted English pragmatism, I have to say the Russian joke was more useful than that cute nursery rhyme. It provided solid information, of benefit to sociologist, hygienist and epidemiologist alike.

Bedbug infestations usually occur in congested urban dwellings whose residents have a rather laissez-faire attitude to hygiene. They wear old shabby clothes, often hand-me-downs, their rooms are stuffed with dilapidated furniture, they hardly ever vacuum.

Bedbugs thrive on such environments, which is why they did so well in Moscow. Most of the people there – and not just the working classes – lived in crowded communal apartments, had no money to buy new clothes or bed linen, hardly ever owned a vacuum cleaner, and their only concession to hygiene was taking a bath once a month, whether they needed it or not.

Why am I boring you with such useless information? If you have to ask, not only did you never live in the Moscow of my time, but you are clearly not living in the Paris of today.

That city is suffering a major invasion of bedbugs, and the rest of the country isn’t far behind. Recent data show that one in ten French households have that problem.

More to the point, ten out of ten French households, and the same proportion of British ones, are exposed to an avalanche of woke bilge engulfing every aspect of life. Including, oddly enough, even the presence of bedbugs.

All hell broke loose when a TV news anchor put this question to the founder of a pest-control firm:  

“There is a lot of immigration at the moment. Is it people who don’t have the same hygiene conditions as those in France who bring [bedbugs]…?”

You what?!? That deafening scream emitted in unison from thousands of woke throats. That anchor (and no, it isn’t Cockney rhyming slang) was guilty of hate speech, racism, fascism, along with every other ism you’ve ever heard of, and I’m sure you’ve heard of many.

Instead of bending over and taking his punishment like a man, the hapless journalist made matters worse by trying to defend himself. “Must journalists justify the questions they ask?” he said. A mighty roar delivered a deafening reply: “You bet your sweet cul they do!”

The anchor complained of being “insulted, harassed, defamed” and generally “pilloried” for “refusing to accept the uniformity of thought.” Personally, I’m not aware of any pressure to accept uniform thought on the subject of bedbugs – in fact, I didn’t know such uniformity existed.

But in fact he was probably referring to a broader issue, that of uncontrolled immigration. His TV channel has problems with tectonic demographic shifts that introduce alien cultural and social mores and, as the anchor implied, also unpleasant pests.

For the record, the aforementioned expert on pest control pointed out the presenter’s mistake. Neither immigration nor hygiene, he said, has anything to do with bedbugs: “That is why they affect absolutely everyone.”

Well, not quite everyone, monsieur. It’s true that understated hygiene isn’t a major cause of bedbug infestation, although it’s certainly a minor one. But, like some of my best friends, bedbugs are good and avid travellers.

They can happily hitch a ride with people moving from an infested area to a previously pristine one. They then settle in crowded, dirty, impoverished places – like the Paris ghetto-like banlieues and the communal flats of my childhood.

Having sucked enough underprivileged blood, bedbugs can then travel by local transportation to the upmarket areas, and indeed “affect absolutely anyone”. Yet, conditioned as I am to look for primary causes, I think it’s wrong to say that mass immigration has nothing to do with it.

Other French pest-control experts, those who haven’t yet cottoned on to the profound political implications of bedbugs, concur. They warn that an influx of tourists at next year’s Olympics is likely to increase the population of Paris bedbugs and also of rats.

In fact, they see a direct link between mass tourism – and of course immigration – and the profusion of bedbugs. Those blood-suckers disappeared in France immediately after the war, only to come back some 40 years later with millions of couples wishing to be photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower – and also huddled African masses yearning to be rich.

Then how come, I can hear you ask, Britain doesn’t have the same problem with bedbugs? After all, we have no shortage of either tourists or immigrants.

Honest answer? I haven’t a clue. You can’t expect me to answer every trick question. To quote Russian folklore again, I’m not a magician. I’m only learning.