The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2305 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

I was determined I wasn’t going to walk funny or sit down awkwardly or Trish would be laughing at me and saying I’d had sex or a good seeing to—which would be perfectly true. I didn’t mind them knowing I had, or we had, it’s just the childish manner in which she spouts it to all and sundry. Then she is only nine years old, I keep forgetting that intelligence does not equate with maturity. She’s the most intelligent person in the house but has little common sense. Show her a problem and she’ll come up with a solution—not always the most practical one because much of that is based upon experience and at nine is obviously limited. Show her something and she remembers it, then so do Livvie and Mima. Little Cate seems to be quite bright as well, though I suppose having all these bright sparks around may help her develop quicker than she might otherwise do, if only to survive. I don’t mean that literally, but in a competitive environment things either buck up or perish. While that wouldn’t happen in a human community, not in a sophisticated one like the developed nations, it would tend to help her develop faster, which I suspect she is, as are Puddin’ and Fiona, Stella two little monsters angels.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have had siblings. Obviously a sister would probably have been easier to live with than a brother. I suspect given my history, a boy would have found it harder to cope than a girl but I can’t be sure and it would depend upon their individual concepts of what was and wasn’t acceptable.

People who change sex will never be completely accepted even though at times it seems epidemic and I probably agree that transsexualism is a disease caught by transvestites and is highly infectious. I personally believe transsexuals are relatively rare beasts, while lots of men like to crossdress. Why was I thinking about this? I wasn’t sure, possibly I was thinking about Danni—I wasn’t convinced she was really transsexual—unless it was going back from girl to boy, so her life might always have an element of challenge to it. If she stays as a girl, which is probably the best solution, as she’ll become increasingly female in body shape, I wonder what sort woman she’ll become. She seems to fancy boys, but when she first came here as a boy, she was always looking at the girls and making boyish statements. Was she actually sussing out the girls like I did, learning gesture, language and so on rather than seeing who had the biggest tits and wanting to play with them.

My head was hurting. Simon had gone to work and woke me up as he left with Sammi. How he gets by with so little sleep astounds me, why I woke and didn’t go back off concerned me, usually that’s what I do but not today. I didn’t know why.

Instead of torturing my mind any further I got up and showered, It was only half past six when I’d dried myself and my hair and clad myself ready for work. Since the mammal survey had gone Europe wide, I’d been deluged with records complete with yeas or nays from the local experts we’d set up. I was often the final arbiter which gave me loads of power but also equal responsibility.

I spent hours every week collating statistics, circulating them after having them checked for statistical accuracy, and then correcting them if there were any great discrepancies or disagreements from the local experts. Most of the time it worked possibly because I had old records to guide me. What caused all sorts of problems were human made situations like the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

I admit I was somewhat biased against Russians having had them try to kill me and my family. It seemed to be a country governed by bandits which I didn’t understand because Britain had dumped the peasant farmer some couple of hundred years before, if not longer. The Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries had still been slightly feudal as the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the writings of Thomas Hardy showed, but not like tsarist or communist Russia.

I glanced at the clock as I heard the radio come on and stopped my musing to rouse the children. Of course having got myself tidily dressed, Lizzie demanded feeding, so I left the others to their own devices and took the baby down to feed her. She was still suckling when Trish arrived with Danielle to have their breakfast.

They were discussing the football from the weekend, Danni was a bit triumphalist that Chelsea had stuffed Arsenal by several goals to nil while Trish seemed quite pleased the Man United had won. Neither really interested me but how Cavendish fared in the Milan—San Remo on Sunday, would. It’s a tough race but the best of the classics for a sprinter and though he underplays his prospects these days, he’d love to win it again.

Breakfast over I took the girls to school, Danielle seemed to be fitting in quite well, better than either of us had expected, so I hoped she would settle down and get reasonable grades—she’d improved no end with the private tutoring and I felt the girls school was more likely to maintain that standard than her previous one—not that she could have returned there as a girl. Her life would have been impossible.

I watched them trot into school before driving off to the university and my survey work. Hilary watched me looking at bits of paper and fiddling with the computer occasionally cursing both when they produced results I wasn’t expecting. She brought me a cuppa about half past ten.

“This the famous mammal database?” she indicated with a nod towards my computer.

“Yes and sometimes I wish I’d never seen it.”

“Why?”

“It’s so much work.”

“But surely it’ll give you, like, loads of data about all sorts of mammals.”

“Or show us how much more we need to collect.”

“But that’s a positive in lots of ways.”

“All of it can be seen as positive, but appending records is so tedious. I came down here to study dormice not decide if some sort of weird field mouse in Sweden is a valid record. I also expected to be out doing fieldwork not sitting at a desk.”

“’Cept it’s better than being outta work like so many are.”

“That is very true.”

“Still you’re okay, your family is wealthy, so you could survive being a housewife and mother. Mine isn’t and I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have this job.”

“What I’ve seen of you in the dormouse tending and helping with the microscopy last week, I suspect the job is yours as long as you want it. My only condition to that would be, if you see something you want to do more elsewhere, go and do it. Life is too short to miss opportunities and there is no guarantee they’ll present themselves again.”

“Yeah, you sound like my ex tutor at Manchester, she was always telling me to go for it—then the funding ran out and I had to get a job as best I could. This was it.”

“Don’t let fear stop you taking occasional risks.”

“Oh I don’t, though when my friend was killed surfing, it sorta put me off a bit.”

“You go surfing?”

“Yeah, try to get down to Cornwall as often as I can.”

“Despite what I said, be careful on the bit of wood.”

“I will, I mean great whites haven’t got this far north yet and I survived in Australia despite all the shark attacks there.”

“I suspect undertows and currents are far more dangerous than large fish.”

“Yeah, they probably are.”