[Techman]

When I went through a stage of being involved with rewiring houses back in the 70s, I used to find two extremes of either old rubber in perfect condition or absolutely rotten. I remember we levered up a long floorboard on someones landing while doing a rewire and the entire top half of the insulation of a long multi cable run was left stuck to the floor board, leaving the bottom half with all the shiny conductors exposed but perfectly in place in the bottom half of the insulation.

I'm not shocked by anything, as I've pretty much seen it all before, including such things as rotten rubber cable with junction boxes made from old square tobacco tins with just twisted connections inside, found in the loft when asked to repair a non working light fitting in the bedroom of an old farm house - now long knocked down!