The house gecko living in my bathroom is getting fatter and fatter by the day.

One of the house geckos on the skirting board in my bedroom

My nice white walls are peppered with little black droppings. There’s no way Mr Gecko will fit back through the thin gap by the window frame. His greed for mosquito breakfast, mosquito lunch and ‘guess what?’ for dinner has led to a self-imposed life of confinement.

I rarely see more than a flash of his growing gecko body as he darts behind the toilet cistern as soon as I approach – but the evidence of his presence is there, everywhere.

I’m happy to accommodate anyone who likes eating mosquitoes, but am getting a bit tired of his idea of ‘home decoration.’

Enough already!

But how do you catch a gecko?

Well, let’s say: don’t try it after half a bottle of Waragi (local gin)…

House gecko hiding in the corner of my windowframe

Aware that this little house gecko will rapidly grow thanks to our proximity to Namuwongo’s swamp, and its mosquito residents, I decide to try and catch the small gecko in the sitting-room and ‘release it back into the wild’.

“Now Keith, if you had helped me catch the gecko, this would not have happened!” (The gecko would not have run away from us in a panic, leaving his tail stuck to the wall… wiggling at me reproachfully, I might imagine).