The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1770 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

I slept with Trish, who woke me up sounding like baby bear, “Why are you sleeping in my bed?”

She accepted my reason with a shrug of her shoulders and we rose, showered and went for breakfast. Simon came down looking a tad grumpy–apparently he was cross with me for sleeping with Trish. I gave him a yarn about her being frightened after her ordeal and he was quite okay about it.

We’d just finished clearing up after breakfast and I’d nearly forgotten about a trip to Cambridge when Tom came in. “There’s an awfy mess up in Cambridge, they’ve screwed up yer survey somethin’ rotten.”

I felt a cold shudder run through me. I asked him to elaborate and he explained that someone, a cleaner they thought, had dumped a whole pile of data which they hadn’t input on to the computer records. They had found some of it in a skip but weren’t sure what they’d sent us and what they hadn’t. The other problem was they’d had a computer crash which they were still trying to sort, so they couldn’t access their records anyway. Could I help?

I’d got the impression that I would be sent to Cambridge to help an individual not a university department. So had my visitor got things a bit wrong–it was unlikely, so I presumed, the real reason for going there would make itself manifest later.

I asked Trish if she wanted to come for a ride in the car–she wasn’t terribly interested until I told her she could have a quick look at one of the universities at Cambridge. She grabbed her laptop and her power inverter and I collected some data sticks and my laptop, quickly put on some makeup and set off for St Augustin’s College–known locally as Gussie’s, apparently.

I had to stop to fill my tanks–yeah, there’s a reserve–and then it was up a hundred and fifty miles of motorway. Trish got bored looking out the window and began fiddling with her computer, which she ran off the car battery via the inverter.

I asked her what she was doing and she said she was sending emails to Menorca to her sisters. I enquired about Danny and apparently he was out somewhere with Henry while the girls worked on their tans.

“Tell them not to spend too much time tanning, tanned skin is damaged skin.” I heard her typing away and she presumably pressed ‘send’. “What did you tell them?”

“I said what you told me to.”

“Yes, but how did you word it?”

“Stop sitting in the sun or you’ll get skin cancer.”

It was succinct, if lacking in subtlety.

Her computer peeped and she laughed.

“What did they say?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Okay, tell me anyway.”

“That’s okay, Mummy will fix it. Wasn’t melanoma one of the spice girls–deadly spice?”

“Tell them I didn’t find that funny.”

“I’ve got better things to do, you tell them.” This from an eight year old.

“Trish, I think you’d better do as I say or that computer is going in the boot.” We spent the next fifty miles having a discourse about the lack of respect some children seem to show their parents.

We stopped briefly outside Cambridge and had a burger for a quick lunch. I dislike the things but it was quick and we arrived at our destination some three and half hours after we set off, thanks to directions via Trish and her computer.

Dr Mary Quantock was the person in charge of rectifying the problems–she was a lecturer in ecology and responsible for their computer systems. She was no blue-stocking–about thirty with a beautiful face and a figure to die for–she somehow managed to slink her body into a pair of jeans which looked as if they’d been painted on, a top which had to be by Chanel and a perfume to match. I’d forgotten to squirt any smellies except antiperspirant, so while I should smell clean, I wasn’t smelling of a designer niff.

Trish took to her immediately and watched while Dr Quantock and one of her post grad students tried to resolve some glitch in the software. They weren’t getting very far.

“Can I try?” she asked, and after checking that she couldn’t do any damage, they let her. In ten minutes she’d sorted it. I began to wonder if this was why I was told to take her, not that I had to heal someone. And I had to take her because she can’t drive or travel by herself.

Quantock and her student, Phil something or other were aghast, and they looked suitably horrified while Trish explained what she’d done. It went over my head and I sat down and looked at the books on the shelf in Quantock’s office.

Then I was promoted to tea girl, while my daughter showed them how to reintegrate their data or something and she helped them recover all they’d lost. It was now tea time.

“You must come back to my house for a meal,” she insisted and as she only lived five minutes away, I agreed. Trish was hoping she had more computers to play with there.

Trish found the computer and began checking the systems on it, while I followed Mary to the kitchen as she knocked up a quick meal of pasta.

“How old is she?” she asked me about Trish.

“Eight, going on twenty eight.”

“What does she want to do?”

“About what?”

“A career, she’s obviously super bright.”

“She has an IQ off the scale, she makes Newton look thick.”

Mary thought that was funny. “So what does she want to do?”

“She isn’t sure, some days it’s astrophysics or particle physics, then it’s medicine, or computers or archaeology.”

“She doesn’t fancy ecology, then?”

“I haven’t asked her.”

“I could probably offer her a provisional place now.”

“What? She’s eight.”

“Yes, she’d have to do an A-level or two but I reckon we could take her from age fourteen, if she’s interested.”

“I doubt she’d have the maturity to cope with university at fourteen.” I felt quite anxious, especially as I’d nearly lost her a few days ago.

We ate with me preparing myself to intervene if any sort of offer was forthcoming. It wasn’t but, Mary asked Trish if she’d to do some puzzles. Trish’s tail was up and she accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. She took Trish to her study while I cleared the table–she was back five minutes later.

“What have you given her, a Sudoku?”

“Uh no, I’ve given her the entrance paper we used the year before last.”

“She’s eight, Mary, she won’t understand half the wording of a university paper.”

“I just want to see how bright she really is.”

“I told you, very–the problem is she’s difficult to assess because of her lack of maturity.”

“Sounds like half the first years we get these days.”

“I know the feeling, I wonder if English is a second or third language with half of mine.”

“D’you have a lot of immigrants then?”

“We have our share, but I was thinking about the white, Anglo Saxon types who speak Pompey not English as it occurs in the OED.

“Speak Pompey?”

“Yeah, it was a dockyard dialect originally, I can hardly understand broad Pompey, it only makes sense to those born there, not us f’rners.”

“Oh, I see–where are you from then?”

“Originally, Dumfries but I was brought up in Bristol.”

“Did you study at Bristol–I have a friend who teaches there?”

“No, I went to Sussex.”

“Ah, one of Ezzie’s girls, then?” she gave me a very knowing look.

“He was my professor but I avoided any extra-curricular contact with him.”

“Goodness, a pretty one who escaped his clutches–your family is full of surprises,” she said smiling at me.

Yes, Mary Quantock, you don’t know the half of it.