Hey, guess what nearly happened to me today

So, the last two nights I've hardly slept at all. The reason? There has been a strange noise in my room. A noise kind of like a motorway in the distance or a train just on the edge of hearing. Annoying and constant. Still, I thought the water in the pipes somewhere through the house was just being a bit temperamental.

Turns out it was. Only it wasn't in the pipes at all, it was pouring over electrical wires in the loft that just happened to have been chewed through by rats, causing much sparking and smoking and about-to-burst-into-flames-ness. I'm lucky as hell that it was Wednesday and Steve was here because if I'd been here on my own, I'd have probably looked at the water pouring through my bedroom ceiling and just turned it off and left it until the next day, rather than do what he did, which was to get the ladder out and root around in the attic.

I'm making it sound dramatic. It wasn't really. Really, it was;

Steve: *roots around loft muttering about cowboys and exclaiming 'oh my God' every now and again*
Me: *perched on ladder with head poking through attic door* What happened?
Steve: *mutter mutter* Bloody hell, unbelievable! This isn't good, this isn't good...
Me: *picks up something white, sees its rat poison, squeals and throws it away* What?
Steve: Pipes broken. Who puts copper pipe into a plastic joint*? (*not proper term but I can't remember the technical stuff). Water's pouring over your electrics.
Me: *blinks* Oh. Shit.
Steve: Yeah. Its smoking a bit.
Me: ...good. All the lights just went off.
Steve: Oh, thats why it stopped then.

Only it wasn't smoking 'a bit', it was smoking a lot and throwing sparks out all over the place. And then all the electric went off in the house and we had to get every saucepan out of the kitchen to catch the water pouring out of my bedroom ceiling and I have no heating, no hot water and no lights upstairs. I'm more pissed off about the fact that I just recently painted that fucking ceiling and it was a nightmare and I'm buggered if I'm doing it again. Also, more water dripped down from my bedroom into the sitting room below, all over my not-very-old sofa. And all this happened ten minutes after my house management people closed for the evening so there's nothing that can be done until nine tomorrow morning.

But! Somewhere in an alternate universe there's a house that's burned to the ground right now and it isn't mine and I'm lucky. Hurrah the babydaddy!