Reminds me of a story involving my elder cousin who was supposed to be the intelligent one in the family and went on to quite high rank in the police force!
In our late teens we all lived in a student house that was infested with rats great big things the size of cats in a very poor part of Birmingham. This so-called intelligent cousin was sick of it so devised what he called the ‘ultimate mouse deterrent’. A sheet of three ply wood which he covered with silver foil then drew round a saucepan lid in the centre and a larger one just outside it and cutout a ring of silver foil with a Stanley knife. So what we had was a clear ring of wood between two lots of foil. He then hammered four nails through from the other side in the centre so spikes appeared in the middle circle. As we stood around amazed he took a length of electrical cable with a three pin plug stripped the wire from the non-plug end and wrapped the positive wire around one of the nails. The negative wire he nailed to the outer ring of silver foil.
That night he put some food I think it was bacon from memory on the nails and plugged it in as we all waited for him to be electrocuted but nothing happened. We carried on drinking for an hour and went to bed only to wake in the morning to a pitch black house with no light working. Going downstairs you could smell what at first we thought it was the fuse box having blown up but the site that greeted us when we went in the kitchen was totally horrendous it was if someone had put a hand grenade inside an animal as there were bits all over the units even the ceiling of the kitchen was covered. Not much of the rat was left but it was clear that it had worked but we banned in from ever using it again after it took us two hours to scrape the kitchen unit clean.
Of course we were young and daft but he told us he knew what he was doing and we trusted him being the oldest one in the house 🤣🤣🤣
BR
Colin
