On snakes and mice.

Our snake, their mouse - Tale without tail: rodent in UK loaf

AMIT ROY =====================================================

London, Sept. 28: Sorry if this spoils your breakfast, but know that your morning toast and poached egg are being sacrificed for the sake of restoring national honour. For, here’s a chance to smear egg on the faces of all those making a toast of India’s dignity by cribbing about the absence of hygiene and presence of a snake at Delhi’s Games Village. The story is about the missed breakfast of Stephen Forse, an Englishman who discovered a dead, tail-less mouse wedged in a fresh loaf of bread at his home in Kidlington, Oxfordshire. It happened in January but the matter came to a head only last week, when the filthy toilets at the Commonwealth Games athletes’ quarters in Delhi were making waves on TV screens in the West. So, here’s how to turn the tables: Indian athletes selected for the 2012 London Olympics, especially the vegetarians among them, may now justifiably threaten to pull out unless they are reassured about the contents of British sandwiches. Sure, soft drinks bottles and chocolate bars do now and then throw up insects and worms in India too, but Forse’s predicament has an added twist in the tale, thanks to the unresolved Mystery of the Missing Mouse Tail. The father of two had ordered a Hovis loaf and other items online through a Tesco branch in Bicester near Oxford, and was making sandwiches for his children when he stopped in his track. “I noticed a dark-coloured object embedded in the corner of three or four slices,” he said. “As I looked closer I saw that the object had fur on it.” Forse continued to prepare some sandwiches from another loaf of bread, checking each slice carefully. “I still felt quite shaken. As I was feeling ill I couldn’t face eating anything myself. My six-year-old daughter commented, ‘Why aren’t you eating anything, daddy?’ to which I just replied that I wasn’t hungry.” Forse contacted his local authority, Cherwell District Council, which sent environmental health officers who collected the incriminating evidence with the thoroughness of a Miss Marple. One of them identified the dark object as a mouse minus its tail. “Her comments made me feel ill once again as there was no indication where the tail was,” Forse said. “Had it fallen off prior to the bread being wrapped, or had any of my family eaten it with another slice of bread on a previous day?” Following an investigation, the manufacturers, Premier Foods, were ordered to pay £16,821 at Oxford Crown Court last week. A spokesperson for the company, which also makes Branston pickle and Bisto gravy, said: “We apologise profusely for the distress caused as a result of this isolated incident.” Aileen Smith, the council’s technical officer, said it was no trivial matter. “Mice harbour disease, particularly salmonella (a bacterium), which can result in severe diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and can be fatal to children, the elderly or those with a compromised immune system,” she said. Foreign athletes coming to the London Olympics will worry that if such a mouse had been swimming, metaphorically speaking, in the mouse-coloured sauce of a tikka masala, a jalfrezi, or a korma — three favourite curry recipes in Britain — it may have escaped detection. So more power to Suresh Kalmadi, that stickler for the highest standards, who may wish to take this up with his English Olympic committee counterparts. (the telegraph Calcutta) ================================================