Anecdote – Mice in smoke

Mice in smoke

At first it was just a tiny whiff. Then there was a definite acrid smell. We did not know where it was coming from.

We being Pete and I. We shared a room in a student house in Ilford run by a landlord we never saw (probably for the best). It was old, shabby and dilapidated. Most of the time we stayed in our room and used the beds as setees. At meal times we ventured out into a shared sitting room. It had a table and four chairs. There were six of us.

On this occasion there was Pete and me sitting there.

The acrid smell began to get worse. Then smoke began to swirl up through the floorboards – there were no carpets.

That was when we decided that we had best investigate. Where there is smoke something was burning. That boded unpleasant things.

Being a student flat we were a little short on tools but I had a screwdriver out in the car and we used that to gouge up the floorboards. Fortunately they were very old and loose. It revealed the cause of the problem.

The house had been rewired. The wires were stapled to the beams and it was soon apparent that they were missing lots of plastic insulation. In many places the insulation had been chewed through and there were sections of bare exposed electric cable.

The smoke was coming from the carcass of a dead mouse. It was suitable justice for the culprit. He had a taste for plastic and his indulgence had seen to him. Like a bird on a power line he had been safe standing on insulating wood gnawing through to the bare wire. He’d made a habit of it. Left to his own devices he probably would have stripped all the insulation off the whole of the electric cabling in the entire house. Except that he had made one fatal error.

While gnawing off the insulation on one wire his tail had touched a bare patch on another. The electricity had arced through his body not only electrocuting the miscreant but cremating him as well.