The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2760 by Angharad Copyright© 2015 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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Hannah left me with yet more to think about, as if I didn’t have enough to begin with and proved we all have different priorities. The only difference being that children are more honest about them, adults keep them hidden because exposure can appear as weakness or allow others to take advantage of you or them.

It’s very sad that in a world which is brimming with danger and natural disasters our biggest worry is other humans. Just look at the world today, hundreds killed in mudslides in South America, millions displaced by civil war in Syria. As a species we really take the biscuit for being the most iniquitous to ever walk the face of this planet. We have a capacity for cooperation which can move mountains, most of the time, we only employ it to fight each other. We might be the most highly developed species in the galaxy or even the universe and we spend our time and resources killing each other—stupid or what? No wonder I love dormice.

The next day saw me doing the introduction to ecology for yet another starter class. I racked my brain cell to give me something different to talk about, in the end I decided to do the ecology of students, something I hadn’t done for a while. Initially they were amused then bemused as I got them to list characteristics of a typical student. Much of it began as tongue in cheek then it became more serious and even cause for heated disagreements.

We looked at its natural habitat a combination of bed/student’s union bar and university campus. I decided we’d leave out the take away and Poundland. Ecology is about looking at species with regard to their habitat, so the three I’d opted for seemed suitable.

When we looked at threats to our species, they varied from warfare or terrorism to alcohol poisoning or the Inland Revenue. When I queried the latter, it had been suggested because it was said graduates were likely to earn much more than non-graduates and thus pay more taxes. As this was futuristic and reality would also show a percentage of graduates currently could either only get low paid jobs or were unemployed while others flew through the experience and continued soaring towards the stars—ahem, well one or two

Risks became failure to continue and those then became things like failing exams and being sent down. Predators, that was interesting as men students talked about other criteria as threats including the tax man and other students/competition for jobs. Whereas the women complained about predatory males, which later became a general misogyny as women were usually discriminated against in regard job selection or pay.

When I asked if this had applied to acceptance by the university to do this course they decided it hadn’t—and that was pretty well unanimous. So we were doing one thing right.

I won’t say the two hours flew past but most of them stayed awake so I’d consider that a positive feature. It didn’t feel as spontaneous as the first time I did it, but I didn’t have quite the burden of office weighing me down in those days. I spent the rest of the day doing admin tasks that a trained monkey could do but don’t tell them, they’ll look to reduce my salary to peanuts.

On walking through the playground to collect the mouseketeers I bumped into the headmistress and as I’d been seen I couldn’t sneak out again and come in behind her. “Lady Cameron, how lovely to see you again.”

I nodded and muttered, “Headmistress,” like I was practicing to play Marlon Brando.

“You haven’t given anymore thought to my proposition, have you?”

“Which one is that.” I stopped a few steps further on. I had no recollection of her asking me to do something.

“Oh dear, you haven’t forgotten?” she looked shocked.

“I think it’s probably more a case of not having remembered, headmistress.”

The edges of her mouth crinkled upwards and she chuckled quietly. “Doesn’t that mean the same?”

“Different emphasis,” I declared.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

I smiled and hoped I wasn’t blushing. I also hoped that my supposed ‘knowing look’ might prevent her from asking in that it would prove her ignorance. It worked, she was distracted and when some little girls came haring down the corridor nearly knocking us both over, the distraction prove enough for me to slip away while she was reading the riot act to two six year olds. I grabbed the troops and we hightailed it home.

Once there I asked Trish if Sister Maria had asked me to do anything lately. She didn’t seem to think so and I began to think I was being conned by our diminutive headmistress. She’s clever enough to do it and certainly has the nerve for it. That I wasn’t caught was fortuitous and proof that I might be almost as wily as the head teacher.

I still find it difficult to reconcile my own total lack of religious belief and the sending of my girls to a convent school. I know it was started by Trish being refused entry by council schools because of the problem with toilets, or so they said—it might offend some parents. I almost answered, ‘screw the parents’ it appears I’m not allowed to upset their narrow minds, but they can do exactly that to me and mine. As Danny said the other day, why should we be pilloried we’ve done nothing wrong, just tried to be ourselves? Ironically, she’s probably the least inclined to do that of the transgender legion in our house.

I reflected on a question that had been raised during my lecture on grassland ecology. A young woman had asked how I knew the hedgerow I’d shown a picture of was hundreds of years old; couldn’t someone have planted it ten years ago, not hundreds?

It was actually the best question I’d been asked for some time. I explained that the dating of hedgerows as a bit of an inexact science compared to DNA analysis or carbon dating. It used something called Hooper’s rules and basically you take a thirty metres of hedgerow and count the number of woody species in it, there are some notable exclusions, eg English elms. Seeing as there aren’t too many of those about these days, it isn’t a great problem. Having arrived at your number you multiply it by a hundred and that gives you roughly the age of the hedge. If you can find supporting literature such as ancient plans or deeds or just mention in old documents, then the rule can be proven. Apparently Dr Max Hooper worked for the Nature Conservancy Council back in the nineteen seventies. I think we might have one in the university library but I saw it in a book by Oliver Rackham.

The study of hedgerows is fascinating especially in a place like the United Kingdom because of the need to display ownership or various laws—the Enclosure Acts—which enabled a land grab by the wealthy taking what was once considered common land, that is land in common ownership by a community, and declaring it their own and then planting a hedge or putting a fence or wall around it. Millions of acres were stolen by the wealthy between 1604 and 1914. The First World War changed the social structures possibly as much as the black death did in the thirteenth century.

From it through pressure by the suffragettes, women began to achieve the vote although it took a further ten years before it was universal to all adult women, something that New Zealand pipped us to by ten years.