The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2551 by Angharad Copyright© 2015 Angharad

---

I had some recollection of the dream and the goddess telling me she was disappointed. I have weird dreams, but then I suppose dreams are usually weird anyway. Some are easy to explain, especially if you’ve been dealing with an issue, others are pretty opaque and inexplicable, except by so called experts. The problem with experts is that anyone can set themselves up as one without any qualification whatsoever. Some are indeed expert others not. I’m labelled as a dormouse expert, or a mammal survey expert, or ecology expert. I study dormice, run the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken on British Mammals and am a professional ecologist. I don’t claim to be expert on anything, but I know quite a bit about each of the topics I mentioned.

Perhaps I’m hung up on the old self esteem hook, I don’t have any, or very little. So I can easily say, I’m not a real expert on anything just like I’m not a real professor or even a real woman or real mother. In a literal sense depending upon definitions of different things, that would be true, but on a workaday basis, they’re not applicable as I function on a real basis in each of those things, and probably know more about dormice than most people.

After dropping the girls off at school, I went to my office to sign endless letters and authorise a few cheques. I was nominally a budget holder for the biological sciences faculty. However, most of the money was already allocated to staff costs or equipment when we got it. A small amount was transferred to the university library to pay for access to journals and buy as many books as we could get for the money. Trying to juggle the money to get the best outcomes for the most people was enough to drive most people mad. Being crazy to start with has advantages insofar as nobody notices new manias.

Just before lunch, Delia told me one of the shortlisted for my housekeeper post had phoned to confirm she would attend. Now if one of the others also confirmed, we’d at least have a contest. I don’t like interviewing as people are such liars today and I frequently seem gullible enough to believe what I’m told—until I discover my mistake and then woe betide them.

We went up to lunch in the refectory and had a jacket spud. To my disgust, they’d run out of tuna mayonnaise so I had to make do with cheese and onion. I had coleslaw with mine and together with a bit of salad garnish, it was actually quite good. The women who serve us know me quite well—they saw my film—so they often call me Dr Dormouse or given my proclivity for a certain type of fish, Professor Tuna. It’s done in good fun so I laugh at it asking if they have dormouse flavoured crisps yet—well they had the hedgehog ones years ago, which was a spoof by a well known crisp manufacturer.

In the afternoon, I had an hour of tutorial with a group of students. This isn’t a normal tutorial; I see every student, admittedly in a group of ten, for an hour. It gives them a chance to feedback on the course, advise me of their difficulties and the bits they enjoyed the most. It could degenerate into a grumble session except I try to keep it to a strict time table. So far so good.

I do it to show that I am accessible to the students, not just hiding in my ivory tower. The feedback has led to further investigation of things they didn’t like and to changes being made. Like I tell them, we use evidence based research in our laboratories so why not in the classroom as well? It also looks good on our prospectus. Sadly that’s important these days. We’re no longer an establishment looking to improve the minds of some young people but one which seeks to suck out the money from their grants or loans. We’re unofficially a business, except when I mention it some of my colleagues agree.

At three I departed to collect some ballast for the car in the shape of schoolgirls. I was late again, but as late as Trish, who had detention for insulting a teacher and being rudely personal about it.

I got the offence right first time, Sister Virginia, sounds like she promotes tobacco, whom Trish addressed as Sister Vagina, felt sufficiently insulted to seek redress. The punishment was for Trish to write a letter of apology, and it had to sound suitably contrite or she’d have to rewrite it.

Of course, Trish doesn’t do humble, so she’s often at logger heads with teachers for her arrogant putdowns. Some are suitably impressed but they know enough to let her perform and criticise, then when she gets tired, she gets challenged and usually falls into the trap, except she isn’t a typical child and if they get one over on her she keeps trying to get even, sometimes pretending that she looked long and hard at evidence to back up her arguments, which she then manufactures and sounds quite authentic, it isn’t of course but by the time she has caused chaos, no one checks her cited evidence, assuming it is correct. She is a real scallywag.

She regularly makes dismissive comments about me, she did last night assuming I didn’t understand her argument with Sister Virginia. I don’t know if I did or not because I committed the greater sin of not listening to her because I was tired. I’ve heard of proton tunnelling and while watching that thing about quantum biology by Jim Al Khalili, I know it came up then—though I’ve forgotten the context, except he had all these balls passing through walls instead of bouncing back as one would expect. Then with quantum, expect the unexpected.

Seeing as so much of what happens in biological processes is going to ultimately be at a subatomic level, I half expect one day to be told that hibernation involves it, the trigger to start it or to wake from it. We traditionally think it’s due to temperature, which it almost certainly is, but what actually happens inside the dormouse brain may well be quantum based; which probably the same inside the brain of the human when he or she first sees then handles a dormouse in the wild. I’ve handled hundreds and it still makes my heart beat a little faster when I find one in a nest box.

The three others were sitting talking with Sister Maria mostly about Danielle’s chances of actually getting a schoolgirl cap. Danni sounded positive, almost confident about it. I had to admit, she had a reasonable chance given her skill level. Sister Maria beamed a smile at the three of them. “An England schoolgirl cap would look good on the school’s list of accomplishment to accompany the ones for netball and badminton.”

I don’t know if my old school had any national champions or players in any sport except tormenting weirdos like me—that was their preferred sport. The school equivalent of fox hunting, where one relatively small animal is chased by a pack of dogs several times larger and morons on horses bigger still. They’re often cheered on by mindless hunt followers who like the Roman public in the days of the Coliseum or the British public when executions were held in public; something we’d find somewhat distasteful today, thank goodness.

A few minutes after I arrived, a nonchalant Trish was still complaining about her adversary’s lack of understanding of physics, despite holding a degree in said subject, and teaching it for a living. She shut up abruptly when she saw the headmistress who gave her a withering look.