Battle against the ants

I don't mind ants as such (as long as they don't sting - these ones don't and are quite small) but when my cereal is crawling with them in the morning it is a bit much.
They are very persistant, I suppose numbers are on their side.
I read on the internet that they cannot cross talc so we tried it out...

Amazingly it seems to be true, as soon as they touch it they change direction and never try to walk over it. Of course it cannot solve all the ant issues (quite apart from it being impractical to live with talc across the front door for ever) as it is harder to make it stick to the walls.

As far as we can tell there are quite a few living under the doorstep and the plan to allow talc free living is to block up all the holes. It seems that there are also a number of holes that go right through the wall as they pop out randomly different places (so far only seen close to the front door) and then set off in to the kitchen to plague us by crawling all over the sink etc. We will also buy a lot of storage containers for all our food as this is sensible against the mice too.

The joys of country living!!