Tim Dowling: mice have been at the pipes. But how have they eaten this much plastic?
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We can’t get a plumber so it’s down to me to fix the washing machine – which means watching a man in a YouTube video. Born in 1877, Engineer Lieutenant Commander Lumley Robinson was serving aboard the cruiser HMS Aboukir when it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on 22 September 1914. Robinson spent more than eight hours in the North Sea before he was rescued. He is better known, however, for being the inventor – in 1921 – of the worm-drive clamp commonly known (and still trademarked) as the Jubilee Clip.
![[Tim Dowling]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2018/01/30/Tim_Dowling,_R.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
I wouldn’t know any of this if a mouse hadn’t eaten the dishwasher’s drain hose while we were away. And by eaten, I do not mean chewed holes in. I mean the mouse had reduced the hose to a lacy shadow, no more substantial than a cobweb, along most of its length.
“How long would that even take?” my wife says as we peer under the sink, surrounded by extracted cleaning products, kneeling on the damp floor. “I guess it depends,” I say, “on whether it’s one diligent mouse or a team of them working round the clock.”.
This is very soon after the washing machine stopped working because the pump was so tightly packed with loose change – and I feel I am being tested. Replacement drain hoses of various lengths are readily available, but the instructional YouTube video I watch – specific to my dishwasher model – is immediately disheartening.
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