The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3426 by Angharad Copyright© 2024 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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I had been back a few days and returned to work. My knees were still tender and I had to avoid kneeling on hard surfaces. Diane was intrigued by my tales of derring-do and asked the question I had been tossing over in my mind. How did the would-be kidnappers know we had gone to Menorca? And when we were there how did they know what we were planning from day to day.

Through Henry's contact we managed to learn that someone at the university had blabbed about our last minute holiday and they had been watching us at the villa with a couple of cameras hidden in the undergrowth across the road from the villa and had been following us about. When the surviving kidnapper realised he was due a sentence of seven to ten years for kidnap, he sang like a canary - well until somebody shot him in prison and silenced him. That really worried me because it showed whoever was in charge was pretty ruthless and it bore a resemblance to the Russian mafia, I hope they weren't after us again.

The world news was awful as it had been for some time; Putin had had Navalny killed and Israel was still bombarding Gaza. Britain was like a third world country because the Tories had stripped it bare and were the only ones to profit from it. We had no public services to talk about, all the streams and rivers were polluted to hell by water companies who didn't give a shit. Actually that's not true, they gave a lot of shit, mostly discharged in sewage along with farmers who were complaining - when don't they? - who had decimated our wildlife and also allowed run off from fields and muck heaps to finish making all the rivers and streams eutrophic, even Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles was becoming eutrophic, probably from sewage or run off. This means that the lake becomes invaded by algae because there is too much in the way of nutrients in the water. The algae flourishes, uses up all the oxygen in the water, poisoning all the fish and macroinvertebrates and eventually poisoning other animals like dogs, who drink from the polluted water.

How this has all been allowed to happen is because the stupid government we have had for 14 years has been cutting resources to the Environment Agency and Ofwat who regulate the standard of freshwater, so they haven't been doing their job properly and the water companies have preferred to pay shareholders and chief execs lots of money instead of reinvesting it in the companies to improve facilities. It's been going on a long time and we actually have a situation where water companies are pleading poverty - why? Because they gave the money away to chief execs in bonuses. Explain to me how anyone can have a bonus after leaking sewage into rivers for thousands of hours, or into the sea making swimmers and surfers ill. Clearly they aren't doing their jobs properly and should be jailed rather than given huge sums of money.

I enquired about how people knew I was away and where and it seemed to be common knowledge throughout the science department. They also seemed to know about the attempt to kidnap me or one of my children. What surprised me was when Diane told me that lots of staff and students didn't have a lot of sympathy for us as a family because if we weren't so damned rich, no one would bother, because like ordinary people we'd have nothing to pay for a ransom. I was devastated and went to see Tom who invited me to lunch and turned down my attempt to resign.

I burst into tears and asked what I had to do. It wasn't my fault that I'd married a millionaire, and I'd helped loads of people at the university over the years, so why did I bother if they thought so little of me?

He hugged me and told me that I cared about the university, its staff and students and for the environment and my dormice. I had done loads that people didn't know about or didn't care about. There would always be those who were envious of me and the money we had, but they always would be. They didn't appreciate how hard I worked and how I was always ready to help anyone in trouble.

He told me while I was away that some of my biologists had found the previously unknown breeding area of an endangered river turtle that I had found funding for and had also suggested they speak to locals because they often have knowledge foreigners don't, even so called experts. They found it because they used locals' info and it was in all the UK papers, though my name wasn't mentioned. He told me in no uncertain terms that it only happened because I set it up and gave appropriate advice.

I wasn't so sure and felt my time at Portsmouth was coming to an end. He told me if I resigned he would too and that I still had lots to do, so to think again. I told him I would speak to Simon and the kids. He looked at me and nodded then suggested I took a sabbatical. That was something I hadn't thought of and would discuss with Simon and the family. He also suggested to me to write a study on the dormouse, a proper scientific one this time showing all the current research people were doing including my own over the years.

We went back to the university and I felt tons better. I had a long chat with Diane and she told me to ignore the gainsayers who were just jealous of my lifestyle and owning several properties as well as having so many kids. She said some saw me like an alien who had no concept of how it was to struggle on a budget with the rise in the cost of living, and I told her it wasn't always that way.

"Why don't you write a biography then, tell people how you have suffered at the hands of bigots and how much you have tried to do to protect dormice as well as students and staff of the university. How you have risked life and limb to protect your family and how you have performed near miracles on several people. That, I thought would be the last thing I did, though some advice from 'Milady' would not go to waste.

It was Friday and Tom had told me to go home and think clearly about what I wanted in life and to go for it. I decided to take some of his advice and after the chat with Diane, I left early, advising Trish, Danni and Sarah what I was doing. They all said they'd get a lift with Danni, so I drove home, had a cuppa and promptly fell asleep, waking up later as the girls got in from uni and my bladder needed to relieve the pressure in it.

After dealing with my urinary needs, I sat with the girls in the kitchen over a pot of tea. David carried on making the dinner. I asked them what they thought of me taking a sabbatical. It seemed they were all in favour as long as if I went anywhere exotic during it, I took them too. Poor little rich kids, I had commented and told them of the gain sayers at the university. They weren't exactly shocked, they had heard rumours after getting back, although sometimes their friend didn't always realise that I was their mother. All of those that we had adopted used the surname Cameron, after their dad, but of course in an academic setting I used the surname Watts, my maiden name. It was a pretence to show my academic and family life were different. They weren't really as anything upsetting my family became an issue at work as well, the recent kidnap attempt showed that, although I had to admit that I was independently wealthy as the tax man knew and extracted his pound of flesh. Looking at a recent release of the prime minister's tax bill, my initial reaction was, "Is that all?" I had paid nearly as much on my earnings alone. Of course it backfired, because said outburst was in front of Diane, who accused him 'man of the people' as he tried to portray, saying that he had no idea how ordinary people lived, then looked at me, "Amazingly you do, amazingly!"

"Why is it so amazing? I spent my early university years living like a pauper because I spent my student loan on a racing bike."

'Wasn't that your decision?" she asked in a rather loaded way.

"Yes, it was entirely mine and I lived with the consequences. I bought my everyday clothes in charity shops and lived on toast, salad when it was cheap, and baked beans. I reckon I ate two large loaves a week. For nutritional essentials, I usually had a tin of sardines or pilchards either with toast or a jacket potato. I ate quite a few of those during my undergraduate days."

"So, you bought all your dresses and shoes at charity shops?" asked Diane.

"The one or two I had, I did. I mostly wore womens' jeans because they fitted my big arse better, and oversize jumpers to disguise my blossoming chest, and a duffel coat or a waxed one, again shapeless. My colleagues didn't know if I was a girl or a boy because of my grungy clothes and rather long hair. I knew I was female but I hadn't declared it to the university authorities. "

"Why did you spend all that money on a bike, and didn't your parents fund you through uni? Mine did."

"I fell out with my parents. My dad nearly killed me at one point he beat me up so badly, and I took a pile of pills to end it all, but I was discovered by an electrician who had come to PAT test a new kettle I'd bought. They gave me the antidote to paracetamol and my liver was saved. I was very lucky. I was here then doing a masters' and while I was in hospital recovering, Prof Agnew came to see me and asked me the reason for my distress. I had kept it hidden from most people, but he showed sincere concern, not the fake kind so many use, and because I was debilitated both physically and mentally, I told him. I learned much later that my previous professor at Sussex, Prof Herbert, knew Tom had had a transgender daughter who had been killed in a traffic accident, and although he didn't show me that he was trying to figure me out, he was the one who suggested I go and see Tom speaking at a public lecture. I actually criticised him; he was talking about surveys, and I was and had been actively involved in surveys of all sorts, and told him what he was doing wrong. Only an adolescent could do that to a professor. He challenged me to prove it and offered me a chance to do a master's degree to show him.

"I was quite up to challenges, perhaps it was the last bastion of my declining maleness. The reason I bought the bike was because I tried to join the university racing (cycling) club and they told me to go try with the girls. I was so disgusted that I bought a top flight road bike, using up virtually all my money and trained every day. I had my revenge when I beat the guy who told me to join the girlies, in a hill climb competition, not only beat him but destroyed him. He wasn't aware of it but I was."

"So you won a pyrrhic victory and nearly got killed by your dad. Why did he try to kill you?"

"Because I told him I was transsexual, he teased me about my long hair and girlish appearance. He just attacked me. Anyway, while I was recovering and Tom came to see me, he could recognise several of his daughter's traits in me. Then I confessed to him and he told me that he understood and if I wanted to do anything about it he and the university would support me. I was astonished; he also knew my psychiatrist, because would be suicides had to have psychiatric evaluation, I suppose to stop them trying again. Dr Thomas was wonderful and encouraged me think about transitioning. To be honest, I had done nothing but think about transitioning but was too scared to do it. Then one day I was out for a ride on the expensive bike, ran into a thunderstorm and got knocked off my bike by Simon's sister, Stella. A real maniac in a car, she picked me up and took me home and saw my 'inbetween' body, I was taking oestrogen and because I was testosterone insensitive, I was going through a female puberty and growing breasts. Annoyingly, in order to ride my bike in lycra, I had to bind my boobs.

"She had destroyed my riding kit in hitting me off my bike and after bathing me, I was all bruised and scratched, she gave me some of her clothes to wear, tidied up my hair a little and made me up as a woman. My own attempts had been awful but suddenly here was this quite pretty woman revealed to me. I never went back to being a boy, ran into Tom in town and we went for a cuppa and he told me he was glad to meet the real me at last, fended off some unwelcome interest from fellow students at my apartment block and told me he expected to see me dressed as I was back in college."

"So now you have my history, or part of it."

"She looked at me and said, "Wow, you have to do a biography." I just thought, 'No Way.'