The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2518 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad

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Tom seemed to think I should avoid trying to expose Mr Mobster Gasgoine and just concentrate on arguing my case on valid academic and business grounds. My department is making a profit therefore stuff your cuts, accompanied by loudly chanting Na na da na na and making rude hand gestures. If that doesn’t work, offer to move elsewhere taking mammal survey data and management with me and watch department collapse within a year or two at most. Plan B would involve doing this with loads of publicity and making inferences that as a man of dubious morals was unsuitable for the post he held and unworthy of public recognition as anything but a crook. That step could involve some interesting legal developments, especially if we had evidence to back it up. Naturally I’d have to speak to Si and Jason before running in front of the king’s horse in case I ended up in the same condition Emily Davison did.

I suddenly felt very tired. The whole system seemed to be created to allow abuse by those who ran it with very little comeback from the little man or its victims. Successive governments appeared content with a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, because the zeitgeist seemed to encourage a free for all, with the winners able to trample and spit on the losers—who had only themselves to blame for being losers and thus poor.

Capitalism reminds me of a natural system, primarily the ecosystem of the African plains, where smaller numbers of predators consume some of the much larger numbers of herbivores. If there are too many predators the system falls down because they eat all the prey and eventually starve themselves or eat each other until that happens or new prey arrive.

Usually they take the old or weak first—easy killing, so keep the stock strong—it isn’t nice but very effective. Vultures and scavengers mop up the bits they leave or the animals that die from natural causes such as age, disease or famine.

Government would be the largest predator taking taxes off everyone, then the banks and money industry, then retailers of all sorts. The vultures would be venture capitalists and other asset strippers together with various usurers and loan sharks. Thieves of other denominations could be seen as various pest species such as caterpillar infestations or mosquitoes.

Sadly, the age of the great plains herds is over be that North American buffaloes or wildebeest crossing the Serengeti, because of incursion by man, over hunting, or climate change. It has had its time and will decline. Elephants are being slaughtered in huge numbers for ivory by poachers to sell to newly enriched Asians who are too stupid to see the folly of their act. When the poor have money to spend they don’t care where the goods originate or how much they cost, or not in China apparently, where ivory is used for decorative pieces and folk medicine, along with juices from bear’s gall bladders. They also use ground rhinoceros horn as an aphrodisiac—ludicrous isn’t it, unless you’re a rhino, then it becomes deadly serious.

Homo sapiens, now correctly relabelled as Homo stupidus, has been reclassified because of its persistence in nonsensical beliefs such as superstition, religion, UFOs and that UKIP are electable. Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy however seem acceptable to all except JWs.

No wonder I feel tired, the population seems intent on spending as much as it can on whatever crap it’s able to find in the belief that offering it as Christmas presents will give happiness or put the donor in a good light. Is there any intelligent life out there?

The other week we had another US import, ‘Black Friday’ when there was actually rioting in shops over discounted goods. People were fighting for iPhones and televisions. US giant Amazon, had a computer malfunction which caused loads of goods to be offered for a penny, when their real price was much greater. One trader reckoned he’d lost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Amazon, that well known global tax avoider, has refused to compensate losers for its mistake. This is the world we inhabit, where all that matters is being stinking rich, the smell being generated by the decomposition of the bodies of the victims that were fleeced to achieve the ill gotten gains.

The folly is that the wealthier we get, the more unhappy we become because happiness doesn’t come from material gain, it seems to just encourage greater desire or covetousness—which when unfulfilled, as it must eventually become—leads to unhappiness. Mind you, the Royal College of Psychiatrists blame the US led ‘happiness industry’ for encouraging an unrealistic belief that we should be always happy and engendering such thoughts in our children.

I don’t have a problem with the reality that life is always blissful, it ain’t. In fact much of the time it’s anything but. However, I like my children to feel joy or happiness some of the time and while it may prove a distraction by dint of encouraging self-gratification rather than pragmatism, I’d still hope my children had some experience of it, because without life would be like having a UKIP government, the translation of UKIP, which is a foreign word, is I believe, Rochester Taliban. Irony doesn’t seem to feature in their deluded thinking, as their biggest new donor is a tabloid magnate who is himself a naturalised immigrant who made his fortune selling pornography. Don’t you just love politics?

In my experience, happiness is something mostly understood by recollection. We were happy then, rather than the present. It’s also something which is not based on logic or material value, but happens now and again and is frequently recognised by comparison with something more recent. For instance, thinking about this hoodlum being in charge of anything other than slopping out his own cell, makes me feel unhappy. Life was happier before it got this complicated. Simplistic? Probably, but to me, happiness and joy is being with my family or remembering those times, it has nothing to do with money or power. Can I prove it? Yeah, one of my happiest moments was realising I could feed Cate myself, especially after realising what that child had lost in coming to me.

Happiness was waking up after surgery and realising I was woman at last, or as much as I ever could be physically, and sharing the memory of that with Sammi, Julie and Trish when they also had surgery and had the same realisation.

Happiness was discovering that the man of my dreams had accepted me despite my little anomaly and still wanted to be with me. That was pure joy, and although we’ve wobbled occasionally, we still love each other with a passion and I hope compassion.

Oh the light of my life has just arrived, now how do I canvass his opinion about Gasgoine? Time to consider an indirect approach to the topic via feminine wiles, I undid another button on my top and went to greet my bedmate.