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.

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.