SCHOOLBOY Blair McNeill sat on top of the brick wall and eased himself over to the other side, blissfully unaware that his next step could be fatal.

Ignoring his friends' pleas, the 14-year-old stood within the electricity substation, scanning the maze of boxes and tangle of pipework for what someone had told him was a lost football.

"My pals were shouting at me to get off, and I turned and said 'What for? Nothing's going to happen.' Two seconds later - well, that's when it all started."

Blown into the air by 33,000 volts of electricity - the blast could be heard across his home town of Penicuik - Blair ended up hanging precariously from a conductor, in mortal danger as his skin smouldered and clothes melted.

"I couldn't see anything, I didn't feel any pain, I didn't go unconscious. I just felt completely numb," he remembers. "I couldn't feel my legs or my right arm. And all the time I could hear the electricity around me, buzzing."

Today Blair hops from one end of his grandparents' living room to the other, effortlessly bounding over obstacles and landing with a thump on a seat, where he rests one heavily bandaged leg.

He painfully raises his right arm - also swathed in thick crepe dressings - and lifts his football top to reveal an angry red torso, the skin crinkled and burnt in a zig-zag band which reaches around his back.

The flesh is taut and sore, the wound underneath the bandage on his arm stretches almost the length of the underside of his forearm, nearly two inches wide, gaping and raw.

Yet the fact he is here today to contemplate the damage done to his young frame is little short of a miracle. For had it not been for a series of unlikely events, the odds are high that the 14-year-old would not have been around to tell his remarkable tale.

Blair, an adventurous lad with a generous dose of teenage attitude, should probably be dead, his innards cooked by the surge of electricity that ripped through his body as he defied the warnings not to venture beyond the easily-scaled 8ft brick walls of a substation near his home.

"We decided we'd have a game of football but we didn't have a ball," says Blair, recalling the evening of August 23. "Someone said there was a ball inside the substation in Tesco's car park. I didn't know how dangerous it was. I suppose I thought if you can get into it that easily then it couldn't be very dangerous."

But it was. Blair jumped on to the substation's conductor, and as the electricity surged through his body seeking an exit point, his new Manchester United football top melted, his Adidas tracksuit bottoms disintegrated and his flesh cooked.

Luckily, he was wearing new, two-day-old trainers: without an ounce of dampness on them, they minimised the impact of the electricity. Secondly, he had also just removed a metal tongue bar piercing and his two earrings - all of which could have provided perfect conductors for the electricity to do even more damage.

Today, his mother Fiona, 32, shudders as she gazes at what's left of his clothes - and recalls the horrifying sight that greeted her as she raced from her home, alerted by Blair's terrified friends that the Beeslack Community High School pupil had "had a shock".

She jumped in her car and rushed to the nearby Tesco - a regular haunt for local youths to loiter. "I thought they just meant he'd had a fright, maybe a car in the car park. I thought he'd been given a bit of a scare. Then I saw everyone at the substation. I went pure white, everything became blurred. I saw him lying with his leg somehow caught and I thought he was dead until someone said 'It's OK, he's moving'. One of my parents' neighbours' relatives, Brian McGarry, was there. He was brilliant, he climbed in beside Blair and made sure that he didn't try to move in case he did himself more damage.

"He said later that if it had been his grandson he'd like to think someone would try to help but we still can't thank him enough for what he did."

BLAIR had to remain dangling awkwardly until a ScottishPower emergency team arrived to check the electricity had been switched off, enabling waiting rescue workers to free him and rush him to Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary.

There he spent two days doped on painkillers and breathing via a ventilator in intensive care while worried medics monitored his heart and kidneys for possible damage. Later he was moved to the specialist burns unit at St John's Hospital in Livingston where he was assessed as having 43 per cent burns.

Just five weeks on, Blair has defied the doctors' original fears and now returned to his grandparents' Nevis Place home, where he lives. He has already been venturing outdoors, hobbling on crutches to join the friends who saw him blasted into the air by that powerful surge of electricity, and laughing it off.

"He seems all right on the surface, but he has found it pretty tough," admits Fiona, who lives nearby in Meggat Place with her three other children, Rachel, 11, ten-year-old Daniel and Lisa, eight, and her husband, James, 37. "The scarring is affecting him mentally."

Rolls of razor wire have since been placed around the substation's walls in a bid to deter anyone else from climbing inside and a spokesman for ScottishPower says: "This happened despite our best efforts to educate youngsters not to go near these places. We go around schools to outline the dangers that are involved."

This is cache, read story here