Post traumatic squirrel

"How are things?" I ask Vicky.

"Fine," she says. "Apart from the kitchen."

"It's not rats again, is it?"

"They weren't rats," she says firmly."They were squirrels. Quite definitely."

"I thought I heard you mention hairless tails."

"Probably squirrels with stress-related baldness," she says. "It's all that moving home."

I'm still not convinced.

"Just think what it's like for little furry squirrels, breaking into somebody else's kitchen, always worrying that the enticing-looking crumb isn't leftover Christmas cake but warfarin. It all gets too much and one day - bouf - no tail fur. Anyway, that's not the problem," she adds, hurridly.

It turns out that her elderly washing machine has become incontinent. It can no longer be bothered to use the drain but, unknown to her, has taken to relieving itself down behind the kitchen units, which are beginning to smell distinctly cheesy.

Dave the manic decorator is coming to have a look at it. He arrives minus a toolkit but wielding a large axe.

"You've caught me on a manic day," he says. "Lucky you." He hefts the axe from hand to hand as he speaks. "I think you've got a blocked drain."

"And the axe?"

"It'll be vegetation growing straight into it. It's all that rain. The plants are going wild. It's like the Triffids out there. I had to fight off two of my own giant marrows before I'd got five feet into the garden this morning. Good thing I had my axe."

Vicky lets him into the garden and gets on with a little light squirrel spotting to pass the time.

Ten minutes later, there's a gigantic crash and the sight of a mass of green falling from the sky. Vicky rushes outside. Dave is standing proudly atop a pile of leaves.

"Got the bugger," he says, proudly.

"That was my wisteria," says Vicky. "I was training it up the house."

"You'd never have trained that," says Dave. "Not in a year of obedience classes. I saw the look in its face. It was heading straight for your drain."

"Well, it hadn't got there yet," says Vicky. "Have you actually looked at the drain yet?"

"Not as such," says Dave. Together, they investigate. After a while, they haul up something sodden and furry. It turns out to be a very, very dead rat. Or a squirrel, so traumatised by its lack of tail fur that it's drowned itself.