There probably isn't a single person, alive or dead, who hasn't felt it. The unmistakable instinctive feeling that something 'isn't quite right' about a person, situation, or thing, and we've all used the well-worn phrase:
"I smell a rat."
And so it was with one man at the weekend, when he walked into an unused bedroom at his home in the Battambang commune of Tapon, and immediately sensed something was wrong.
Moys Kenwood, 56, 'smelt a rat'.
At first, of course, he didn't really know what kind of animal it had been, but he knew it wasn't that animal anymore. His nostrils told him the animal had expired - possibly days earlier - and was now making its presence felt in a rather 'aromatic' way.
Kenwood turned the room upside down, to no avail. He used a torch and looked under a loose floorboard to see if the thing had died between floors. Nothing. Only when he went up into the roofspace did he sense he was 'getting warm'.
And there it was! A big, plump corpse of a foul-smelling, brown rat, which had clearly been 'played with' by next door's cat, and left to disintegrate, and would probably have finished doing this by 2023.
After having his step-daughter go up into the roofspace to retrieve and dispose of the pest, Kenwood said:
"We gave it the Last Rites, which, for a rat, involves being slung in a plastic bag, and then lobbed onto a raging fire."
