Easy as losing the original episode.
by Angharad
part 387.

The original episode was lost when I tried to load an image with it. I hadn't made a back up copy. This one has therefore cost me a whole evening. I hate computers and all things related to them.

I was exhausted after talking to Simon and Tom, and went off to bed without checking on Spike. I crawled up the stairs and was so tired that I could barely find my mouth with the toothbrush, collapsing into bed and zonking out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I woke once in the night, and staggered to the loo and back barely opening my eyes in between. I slept deeply again. Eventually, I awoke at about eight and after a quick breakfast of tea and cereal, decided I’d do some washing, the sun was shining so it would dry on the line. I loved the smell of clothes which have dried outside compared to those which are dried indoors. It’s also more carbon friendly than tumble drying as well as cheaper.

I chucked my dirty washing in the machine and switched it on, while I was waiting I vacuumed around downstairs. The Dyson always fascinates me, it sucks dirt out of what appear to be clean carpets, and whisks it around in its transparent cylinder.

By the time I’d finished that, the washing was ready to hang out, so I carried the basket and pegs out to the line. It looked as if it was going to be a lovely day. After pegging out my washing, I decided I would mow the lawn later, it was about a foot tall and desperately needed doing. I walked back in through the open kitchen door, which I’d left ajar to let some air into the house. It had been shut up for a few months. I still had a mound of paperwork to sort through, but I’d do that later.

I noticed I’d eaten half the loaf I’d made the day before, so I did another mix and switched on the bread machine. I looked at Spike’s cage and there was no movement, so decided she was asleep–not entirely surprising, they are supposed to be nocturnal creatures.

It was too lovely a day to waste, so I changed and took the Scott out for a ride, doing an hour’s tour of the downs and Clifton before returning to our close. As I rode into the road, a cul-de-sac, I noticed one of the builders working at Margaret and Gregg’s house, was out tipping stuff into a skip. I rode up to him.

“Hi,” I said stopping the bike in front of the skip.

“Hi, nice bike.”

“Yeah, I’m quite pleased with it. Tell me, what’s happened to the couple who own this house?”

“They haven’t lived here since the fire, one of the neighbours saved them apparently.”

“Yeah, I know, it was me and a chap across the road.”

He was checking me out, his eyes wandering over my lycra clad body. “Oh well you know as much as I do.”

“I doubt it, I’ve been away for a few months.”

He continued to probe me with his eyes, “Pity,” he mumbled.

“I beg your pardon?” I said, blushing at his vulgarity.

“Pity you were away, ‘cos then you’d know, wouldn’t ya?”

“Oh, I see,” I admired his quick thinking, but I don’t think that was what he meant originally.

“ ‘Ang on, I’ll ask if the foreman knows anythin’.” He disappeared into the house emerging some minutes later. By this time I’d dismounted my bike and was leaning my bottom on the crossbar. “ E’s in ‘ospital, an’ she’s stayin’ wiv ‘er rellies.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“She’ll be back when we finish ‘er ‘ouse.”

“Okay, thanks very much.” I turned and pushed my bike towards my house aware that he was staring at my bum as I walked. I blushed as I went home, aware that my bum was actually quite a well formed edifice, which cycling kept fairly taut.

I went into the house after safely locking away my bike and made myself a cuppa. As I was drinking it, I felt quite good. After the mess of the past day or two, things were coming better. I informed Spike that things were improving. As I glanced at her cage I noticed some debris on the worktop. There was a hole–she had gnawed through her cage.

Frantically, I checked the nestbox, it was empty–I felt my stomach flip and that horrible sinking feeling in the pit of it. This couldn’t be happening, could it? Just as things begin to look up, some miserable sod craps on me. Somedays, it seemed the universe didn’t just crap, it had veritable diarrhoea–this was one such enteric episode.

I began to search the kitchen. When did she escape? How far could she get? God knows and He and I aren’t talking. I looked under the cooker and the fridge, in the cupboards, under the sink. I clomped around the kitchen and downstairs rooms, calling ‘Spike’ as if it would help. I must be barmy–yes, with worry.

I searched high and low, not a sign of her. Where could she be? Oh no, when I’d been hanging out the washing the door had been open, could she have sneaked out then? She could. I glanced out of the window and watched a neighbour’s cat ‘swimming’ through the grass. Oh no, Spike could be out there. I dashed through the door slamming it shut noisily behind me.

The cat continued it’s perambulation, unhurried by my presence. I shooed and hissed at it, noises which it treated with an air of contempt until I got to within a yard of it, when discretion got the better part of valour and it fled the field, leaping over a high wall at the bottom of my garden.

While I was in the garden, I might as well search there. I wandered around, clomping as my cycling shoes sounded on the path, the grips around the hems of the legs causing me to itch, as I bent down to explore the old compost heap and even try to squint under the shed. I couldn’t find her anywhere and began to curse myself and everything else in the universe, but mostly myself. I had taken my little friend from the relative safety of the university and brought her here to get lost and possibly killed.

She would never survive in the wild, she was fed and watered by humans, she didn’t even know what the wild was like, not even my garden, which was far from ideal for dormice.

Dejectedly, I went back into the kitchen and searched again, in vain. Tearfully, I went up to shower and change. I was back half an hour later in shorts and tee shirt, with trainers on my feet so I could kneel or crawl about the house checking out all the dark places with a torch.

I discovered creepy crawlies and fluff even the Dyson couldn’t reach–then a horrible thought assailed my mind–the Dyson! I’d vacuumed that morning, it was powerful enough to suck the few grams she weighed into it’s chamber. I felt sick. I placed some newspaper on the kitchen floor and emptied out the contents of the Dyson on to it. I sighed with relief, she wasn’t there, minced or otherwise.

I cleared up the mess and began to check all the downstairs rooms again. Dormice are so agile, she could have climbed into anything if she was still in the house. There was no sign of her. As I wondered where next to search, the bread machine peeped, it had baked my loaf.

Oh no, she couldn’t be in there, could she–dormouse pie? I glanced at the machine. I couldn’t see how she could, but then I couldn’t see how she’d escaped in the first place. If she was, she’d have been baked alive–what a horrid death for anything. I remembered as a child trying to save woodlice which were in the dead stuff my dad used to throw on the bonfire.

The machine peeped again interrupting my reverie. How dare it? I approached it and gingerly opened it. I couldn’t see any sign of baked dormouse. I tipped the loaf out on to a cooling tray. Despite my worry, which looked as if it would become grief, the smell of the bread made me feel hungry. I’d not eaten anything for several hours and my stomach was now gurgling.

I made a fresh pot of tea and while it was brewing, I decided I’d cut myself a sandwich from the old loaf. I picked up the bread knife in my right hand, a long bladed, serrated knife, which my mother more correctly called a bread saw.

The loaf was standing on its cut end on the bread board. I should have put it away last night but was too tired. I grasped it in my left hand ready to cut off a slice and my thumb went into what seemed like a cavity, surely not an airhole.

I turned over the loaf and there looking back at me were a pair of bright eyes, blinking in the daylight. “Spike,” I squealed nearly dropping her and the loaf. She seemed unmoved by the worry she had caused me, merely, curling up and going back to sleep in the loaf.

I could quite happily have murdered her and told her so–she remained asleep, so even when I turned to sarcasm and irony, she didn’t move. Bloody rodents!

I put the loaf plus its precious cargo into her cage, duct taping the lid of a tin across the hole. She was safe, I felt such relief it was enough to cause me to weep for joy. When I finally got myself together, I found an old fish tank in the garage which took me the best part of the afternoon to clean up along with its stand. My dad had had tropical fish when I was a kid, until the thermostat went wrong and boiled them all.

I brought the tank and stand into the kitchen and put her cage in the middle. Even a dormouse can’t climb up glass. However, it was only after I went out and got some fine wire mesh and secured it across the top of the tank that I knew she was safe, sadly in solitary confinement, but safe. I would organise something like her previous home, but that would take time and cost me quite a lot. I wonder what happened to the old ones? Maybe Tom would help.

I had wasted half a day on a wild dormouse hunt, she had obviously got hungry and ate her way into the loaf, then got comfy and slept. Life was back on track and my little furry friend was still with me, in fact she had never left me, it was only my frantic mind which had considered that, making two and two into a dozen. I was exhausted, and still hadn’t had anything to eat. Spike was fast asleep, full of my bread, I shook my head at her and picked up the new loaf.