Slugging it out

I don’t usually write on Saturdays, but it has been such a Day I thought I would drop you a line and tell you all about it.

It has been a Day.

I rolled over in the middle of the night to look at the clock and realised it had gone out.

Not gone out as in, thought it might pop off to the Queen’s Head for a quick half before dinner, but gone out as in it was blank, powerless and dark.

A moment of heightened alert led me to realise that the house was unnaturally quiet. Nothing buzzed, or hummed, or purred in the silence.

I did the wife thing with the elbow, and obliged Mark to share in the alert.

When I say it was the middle of the night, actually I mean it was half past nine in the morning, but since we had not gone to bed until almost six, naturally our perception of this was not exactly like yours. For dramatic purposes, imagine you have just been roused from sleep at half past three in the morning.

We staggered downstairs to see if it was just our house, or everybody’s. I ought to add that by now the outside world was covered in a small but satisfactory fall of snow. This had happened whilst we were at work the night before, and had led to some exciting slithery adventures on some of the more remote rural byways.

It was just our house. Mark switched the mains switch, and everything came on, for a second, and then thunked off again.

Clearly we had a problem.

Grumbling and gritty-eyed, we got dressed and took the dogs for an emptying visit to the park. Rosie has never seen snow before and thinks it is very exciting. Then we tramped wearily home and started to investigate.

It did not take long to isolate the circuit responsible, which was, of course, the circuit with everything useful on it, from the fridge to the central heating pump, both of which really needed to be restarted quickly.

Mark plugged important things in on a different circuit, and then we started the tiresome process of working out which socket was causing the whole lot to short out.

It was a great puzzle. Everything seemed dry, usually short-circuiting is caused by some tiresome plumbing misadventure, but we could find none.

When we had tried all of the obvious ones we turned out attention to the horrors, the power cable running to the shed and to the conservatory. Maybe, we thought, a rat had crept into the underground duct and gnawed through the cable.

We hoped not.

In order to establish this we had to go into the socket from which the shed ran, on a spur, and disconnect it. This was inconveniently at the back of the fridge, which is in a little alcove and weighs about half a ton. Worse than that, it has a handy Filtered Water And Perpetual Ice feature, and was connected to the plumbing.

We un-plumbed it. Then we took everything off the top of it and shunted it out, grumbling. The plumbing leaked and we had a minor misadventure with a valve which also caused a flood in the shed. We found some ancient evidence of mouse-ingress, but it was entirely historic, and in any case, the power to the shed turned out to be fine.

We cleaned up after the mouse, mopped up the flood, re-plumbed the Perpetual Ice, and put everything back. Then we tugged out the cooker to see if the cooker socket could possibly be responsible. This sounds easier than it was. The cooker is tidily built into a hole in the floor, in order to be at a good height for me. It is a massive affair with two ovens and does not come with handles supplied.

The cooker socket was fine, although once in that particular hole Mark discovered a tiny drip of waste water leak under the sink. He had plumbed the waste in during the bat-flu crisis, when it had been practically impossible to access parts, and hence had done some desperate improvisation with Sikkaflex glue.

We mopped up that puddle, and he fixed the leak, and then cast his attention to the junction boxes above it. These were not exactly under the sink, but built into the wall between the kitchen and the conservatory, and are an important electrical moment in our house’s wiring.

They were not wet either.

He was entirely frustrated by then, and running out of ideas. He was sitting in a cramped hole under the sink, without electricity, with the sun fast setting by then, and still no idea.

Experimentally, he opened one of the junction boxes.

Inside, having covered all of the terminals in a disgusting mess of slime, was a large, fat slug.

It wasn’t even dead, at least not when Mark opened the box, although I must confess that it did not take very long.

We had electricity after that.

We also had a lot of clearing up, and not much day left before work.

Hurrah for wildlife.