How can you get rid of clothes moths?

Mothballs, lavender bags, cedar wood… what weaponry can help you win the war against moths?
The common clothes moth
The common clothes moth: 'It is possible to defeat moths. You could, for instance, burn your house down.' Photograph: Alamy

When you look at the size of a clothes moth – and sometimes I look at the size of a clothes moth five times a day prior to mashing it violently against a wall/carpet/treasured coat – it seems extraordinary how useless the human race is at killing this most destructive of pests. Without difficulty, people wipe out badgers, cats, other human beings. How hard can it be to kill a scrap of animated dust that lives on old sweat and cardigans?

True, weaponry has advanced, a little, since I was first infested. Two decades ago, when a soft Nicole Farhi cardigan emerged for its first outing with ragged holes already dotting the moth-favoured breast region, the best on offer was mothballs and those bits of amusingly-shaped cedar that are as effective at combating moths as, say, snowballs would be at wiping out the Taliban.

That I followed, scrupulously, the advice at the time – discard the principal moth victims, wash out the drawers, launder any survivors, then ceremonially re-inter what remained with mothballs, lavender and pricey bits of cedar – merely ensured every wardrobe would be turned, in time, into a woollens' charnel house. Even tiny hand-knitted dolls' cardigans that had survived decades in Yorkshire were eaten after a few months on the backs of my daughter's moth-infested bears.

Another purge brought brief security, before it emerged my next house came pre-infested, with larvae in the carpets.

How did the Bayeux tapestry last for hundreds of years before the arrival of poison spray, impregnated strips and the pheromone traps that have finally offered this household a measure of peace? Smug pest controllers like implying that our ancestors were just superior housekeepers – a claim that sits oddly with many accounts of early modern hygiene. Maybe moths just got cleverer? Not that you need a particularly high moth IQ to outwit householders who are already at war on several fronts against ants, mice, woodworm, food moths, nits and woodlice.

That said, it is possible to defeat moths. You could, for instance, burn your house down. You could dress the family entirely in synthetic fleece. Alternatively, you could abandon human relations, give up your job and, like Achilles, devote the rest of your life to warfare. Since it will not, in fact, be enough, once, to empty, spray, fumigate, launder, remove soft toys from weeping children, freeze, rebag, spray, then strew with lures hand-dated to facilitate renewal every three months. You have to do that for ever. Also, the heating should be low, preferably off. In the end, even the most passionate knitwear lover must wonder, is any jumper worth it?

Searching for someone or something to blame, I identify a combination of vintage clothes and ignorance. In a previous life I lived with a keen collector of dead men's suits, tweeds and dinner jackets from Oxfam, which would have cost more to dry clean than they did to buy: slob no-brainer. Even when a cloud of moths emerged from a fetid tailcoat, it never occurred to me that they were emigrating, not taking exercise.

So, 25 years later, what I wish I'd known is: treat vintage clothes like plague victims. Clean them, freeze them, place them in isolation – or, best of all, avoid them entirely, before they kill all your new stuff. Now, the only woollens I own are either on me, in the freezer, or in a zipped bag. Since no normal person has time to hunt through 10 overstuffed bags before they go out, this means you always wear the same things. Maybe the answer to moths is as simple as that: own fewer clothes.