The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3423 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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How do the evenings slip away under a tide of domestic chores even though I'm paying someone to cook my food and clean my house? Admittedly, I'm not the only one who creates the mess, but unless Emily cleans it up, I can be pretty sure no one else will notice it, or if they do, they don't think to clean it up unless they are wanting something in return, and occasionally I play thick so their hints and innuendos don't mean very much to me, or so I pretend.

Danni earns quite a reasonable salary from her football and I insisted she saved some of it and to be fair to her she saves about forty per cent, which is mounting up quite nicely and could be enough to put down as deposit on a house when she stops playing. Quite what she'll do then, who knows? But she should have a biology degree in three or four years and she may even go on to do a Master's. Well, that's up to her and I will only give an opinion if asked.

Trish will be off to Cambridge as soon as I think she's mature enough to survive and by then she'll probably have a PhD but I know she wants in on research and possibly it will be on artificial intelligence. Again that's up to her.

Livvie, is planning on doing English and Journalism. I hope she does better than her birth mother who thought more of her career than her child. I'm not sure her father thought of her at all. So Simon and I were happy to stand in for them and adopt her and she's turned out to be a very pretty and very intelligent teen, who is studying at Southampton and she comes home most weekends. It's only her first year and as she makes friends, I hope she won't come home so often because her friends will be a preferred option to coming home. Whatever she decides, I'll support her and always be pleased to see her. Meems, is waiting to go to Surrey Uni, to study English and Drama. Who'd a thought she'd end up doing that with her speech impediment, which has disappeared now without a trace, Hannah wants to be a social worker because she wants to help kids like she was before she ended up with us. Of course Julie and Pheebs are profiting by being good at what they do, Pheebs also does various beauty therapies as well as hairdressing such as laser and electrolysis. Sammi is still with the bank, earning very good money. I know the intelligence service would like to head-hunt her, but she seems content where she is and they know they can always use her if they need, paying for time, of course. She is still one of the best cyber buffs in the country and says she may go to Cambridge while Trish is there. We'll see.

The lab session went as planned with a little silliness about Elvis again being apparent. I let them work it off and the end I told them quite bluntly to enjoy their lab work but we don't mess around in there because that's when accidents happen. I got some funny looks, mainly disdain, but they settled down and we had a good session.

I worked through lunch sharing what David had made me with Diane. Afterwards, she went to type up the report we'd worked on and I began to daydream, thinking about John Clegg's, Freshwater Life.. I had been using it with the class I did because it has some lovely illustrations.

My mind drifted back to finding the old man and the boy who called his mother, describing me as 'some girl at the door'. Anyway they came and phoned the emergency services and the old chap was saved, so that was a satisfactory outcome and the fact he'd called me a girl, made me smile all the way home, even though I wasn't really trying to be one just then, but Dad had bought me some dungarees because Mum had complained that my clothes got dirty when I went pond dipping, so he thought he was helping. They were girl's dungarees and he was helping me quite a bit although I made sure he didn't see me in them, but with long hair, a growing chest and bum I suppose I did look like a girl. Anyway, Mum stopped complaining so they must have done the trick and I had two or three years wear out of them.

I remembered that I had kept notebooks, which were full of drawings by me or diagrams may be more accurate. If I saw something for the first time I'd draw it if I could and also take a close up photo. Even though I had a nice camera, the photos never came out that accurately but between the drawing and the photo I usually had enough to take a guess at what I'd found. I also took measurements of everything I caught and recorded all of it. So you can see, it gave me a good background for dormice or for fieldwork generally. It was obvious I was going to become a biologist and my dad's dreams of me becoming a quantity surveyor and taking over his business were always likely to be shattered. I had no dislike of his profession, it just wasn't for me.

Hopefully before he died he saw that I was happy both as woman and a biologist. That he used to tease me by calling me Doctor Dormouse to the nurses on his ward showed he had accepted me and I was very glad we had reconciled and even had some sort of relationship before he died. It enabled a degree of closure to me. We never think of these things as we live them but they become increasingly important as we age. I know that I didn't really have the same degree of closure with my Mum, although, I suspect she knew what I was doing as she'd coped with me as a girl a few times when I was in school, the Lady Macbeth time, once or twice when I'd been mistaken as female or when the hairdresser's phoned, they thought my name was Charlotte, which was what happened with the book I got for helping to save that old chap. His son thought I was a girl and so did the police officer who posed with us for the Echo photograph. Dad didn't tell me for years that he'd seen it and felt proud of me for what I'd done even if he didn't approve of my impersonating a girl which was Mum's fault because she played along with it and in fact told me to put on my dungarees and brush my hair because the copper and the old man's son thought I was a girl.

So I got a book I treasured, and felt good about myself and Mum's complicity, but of course, it all faded under attack from Murray who thought I was generally a disgrace because I was obviously a queer. He should have been prosecuted for his treatment of me but as they say, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, so I suppose I got strong. Anyway, I believe he's now in a nursing home and suffering from dementia which I wouldn't wish on anyone, although excuse me for not feeling too much sympathy. He was a bastard to me and has got his deserts. I also heard one of the staff was very gay, so if Murray spotted that, it would drive him bonkers, if so serve him right.

I was pleased I'd been given that book including the inscription inside which is to Charlotte Watts but so what, I have so many second hand books with all sorts of inscriptions inside, some even by the author. Many books I have bought over the years have been declared obsolete by college or university libraries and have been withdrawn and sold to a charity which buys them for a pittance and for the profit they make, they buy books for Africa and places like that and promote literacy. I like it because I get the book and the charity promotes literacy, so a double positive. I have a pile of books on my desk on insects or aquatic insects, most of which are withdrawn but were classics in their day and have useful information. I remember buying my copy of Imms, a real classic on entomology. I got it in Hay-on-Wye, a town built on second-hand books. I have a copy of Chapman, another classic on entomology which I bought with my birthday money. My dad thought I was mad but I was happy. I have a dictionary of entomology, 1100 pages, it's out of print now, but I got a second hand copy for a few quid. It's an amazing book with so much information and I use it so often when I'm planning lessons or need to know something about an insect, even ones I have never heard of before. It's written by an Aussie professor of entomolgy, and to be honest I hadn't heard of him either before, but he knows or knew his stuff. New I suspect it would cost a fortune but I got it cheap.

I know you don't quote stuff which is seen as out of date in a paper of some sort, but it's great for background reading including one like Wigglesworth who wrote a textbook on insect physiology, he was a professor at Cambridge and a leading researcher in his day and he writes quite clearly so really good. I recently bought an American book on Aquatic Insect Ecology, published in 1982 ( before I was born) and it describes how insect ecology was changing from describing an observed species to using your observation to try and speculate what was actually going on; why were several insects doing certain things and then trying to work out if it was adaptive or genetic and how it favoured them, effectively natural selection in action.

So I have a library with a mixture of books both old and new, like Hickin's Caddis larvae book from 1965 with wonderful illustrations which are still used, but which is considered inaccurate for larval descriptions. It only cost me a few pounds but alongside it is Wallace's 'Simple guide to caddis larvae' together with his Key to cased caddis published by the Freshwater Biological Society both of which are current. It means my library takes up quite a bit of space but it has a depth some modern ones don't unless you use the internet, and I have a computer in there too.

I suppose I've always been an academic by inclination, so who'd have thought it is what I have become? Who'd have thought I'd be a woman academic? A few did when they saw the mousey indeterminate creature I was as an undergrad, but most didn't. I tend not to publicise the fact these days, I have served my apprenticeship as a woman and been successful in both my career, my love life, and my family life adopting eleven girls, though one died but we all still remember her and feel her about.

I have been very fortunate on the whole, and have managed to make up the years I didn't have as a girl by watching my children and sharing their girlhoods, and I have known some wonderful people, Simon and Tom or Daddy, as I call him are two of the nicest people you could meet, my pa-in-law, Henry is pretty special too and my children are simply the best kids I could have met, at least as good as I could have produced were I a fertile woman. I have no regrets about my life whatsoever.

"Are you awake?" came the dulcet tones of my secretary/p.a.

"Yes, I was just counting my blessings why?"

"Oh good, we have a bit of a situation, a student has been injured quite badly in one of your labs."

"Oh, shit! Has an ambulance been called? Find the accident book, we need to record it. Which lab?" I rushed out of my office, locking the door after me and ran towards the lab. 'Why does it always end up like this? Life doesn't seem to want me to be complacent. Oh well, let's see what's what,' I said to myself as I thundered down the stairs to my lab.