Experiments...
Over the years, I've lived with some pretty grotty people - ranging from the pillock in halls who got drunk and shat in the showers, to the Mexican in Golders Green who decided to keep a kilo of weird cheese in a carrier bag in the cupboard under the stairs. There was the student house in Bounds Green where one flatmate gradually went mad and refused to do any cleaning - she bought plug-in cooking utensils (rice cooker, toaster etc) and did all her cooking in her room, and then left early at the end of the year leaving us to clean everything. There was the strange Scot in Camberwell who lived entirely off boiled chicken legs, who smelt faintly of windowlene and despair.

The tale that springs to mind, however, regards your humble servant: moi. As a young child, I was possessed of an enquiring mind, and I used to carry out experiments; my parents were pretty ok about this - my mother let me fill up hummus pots with bread and grow mould*, and keep them in the cellar.

As academics, they positively encouraged my inquisitiveness... to the point where I graduated from mould...to MEAT!
One day a bird had got into the thatch and then fallen into the loo and drowned, so I buried it. A week later, I dug it up again, then re-buried it. A week later, I exhumed it once more - so on and so forth for 3 months, until it was completely decomposed.
Obviously, I was very interested (morbidly so) in the decomposition process, and wondered how it might work if a dead animal were not in the ground; fortunately, the cats caught a woodpigeon and left it on the doormat, so I put it in a baking tray and put it in the cellar with the mouldpots.

Then, fickle as a child's mind is, I forgot about it (I was probably distracted by the rumour that the caves in the nearby quarry were caused by giant dinosaur turds which then dissolved leaving the space around it - officially the coolest thing EVER to my friends and I).

I only remembered about it a few months later, when my mother went into the cellar for something, and screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
And then ran upstairs and screamed some more - mostly at me.

The cellar had to be fumigated, and I had to do my experiments at the bottom of the garden after that.



* Results:
Bread + milk = green.
Bread + water = black.
Bread + orange juice = oooh pretty colours!
Bread + some good-quality single malt from my parents' alcohol cupboard = a sound thrashing.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 11:41, Reply)