The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2822 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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Well the rest of the concert seemed a bit tame after that, but I managed to spot Danielle and Livvie in the choir and Mima had been one of the dancers in Trish’s potted nativity performance. Hannah was also one of the dancers and after the final prayer led by the indomitable headmistress, she came and found me.

Something I hadn’t spotted until then was the fact that all the performers from Trish’s rap had been wearing baseball caps—backwards—hardly haute couture but I suppose but most of the ones I've seen in pictures or on the telly, rappers that is, didn’t look clever enough to realise they had their hats on back to front. Having said that, I could well imagine writing what is essentially poor poetry with a rhythmic beat wouldn’t be the easiest accomplishment, though I suspect if you asked them if they were writing verse, they’d say they were better now.

I was still reeling from the hidden talents of my daughters. Eventually Trish and our choristers came and found me and we left. I’d warned Sister Maria that I had to dash and whisked the children off and after a cuppa, a mince pie and a wee, grabbed the case which contained my dress and coat and some night things. I also changed into some jeans and a top plus a cardigan, then after loading the stuff in my car, Stella ran me to the station. The train was on time and I settled myself down in first class and was about to catch up with the latest goings on in Venice, courtesy of Donna Leon, when a familiar voice made my hair stand on end.

“Lady Cameron, how nice to see you again,” and Mrs Browne Coward inserted herself on the opposite side of the table from me. My heart sank. I’d looked forward to catching up with my reading for an hour or so and instead I had the poor man’s hippopotamus sitting opposite.

“Mrs Browne Coward,” I acknowledged back.

“Got to go to a do at the Dorchester,” she said and I nearly pulled the cord and jumped off the train. “Tomorrow night, so I’m going to some last minute shopping in the West End.”

“How nice,” I said hoping it didn’t sound too patronising or too friendly.

“Is that one of those I-pod things?” she said indicating my tablet.

“The I-pod is an MP3 player with huge memory, this is an android type tablet computer.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Size of memory to start with, this is sixty four gigs.”

“Is that good?”

“It means I can keep Encyclopaedia Britannica on here with loads of room to spare.”

“Have you got it on there, then?”

“Uh no, I was just using that as an indication of the size of the memory, sixty four billion bytes or thereabouts.”

“Astonishing what they can do these days isn’t it. I mean I’ve got one of these things, don’t know what half of it is about. Hubby gave it to me for my birthday, darling Petunia had to show me how to make a call and send a text.”

“How is Petunia?”

“She’s fine ever since she left that school. I’m sure half those nuns were repressed, you know whats. She’s doing very well at a little school in Portchester. Captain of the school soccer team. How are your girls?”

“Oh doing okay, you know. Trish and Livvie both play soccer for the school team but Danielle is the most accomplished, she plays for Portsmouth ladies, England schools and has played for the full national side.”

“What England?”

“Yes.”

“You must be very proud of her.”

“I am, she’s turning into quite a nice young lady.”

“What else would she be?” she asked I hoped rhetorically, then decided I would answer anyway.

“You know the way that some girls are almost as bad as their spotty boyfriends in terms of the mischief they get up to, the local papers are full of young women convicted of acts of violence, whereas in our day it was only the very worst who’d get involved in gangs or similarly nasty things.”

“Oh don’t remind me. We had a girl in our school who was sent to prison for stabbing another girl over a boy they both fancied. The girl died.”

“That was a bit over the top wasn’t it? I can recall boys fighting over us girls and girls being nasty to each other but rarely was it more than being spiteful not full blown violence.”

“Which school was that?”

“Bristol Grammar.”

“I went to a little school in Lancing, then did commerce at a place in Chichester, you went to university, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, Sussex Uni, then came here at Tom Agnew’s invitation. I heard him do a talk and wrote to him saying how much I’d enjoyed it and how he could improve things, and he invited me to come and show him and turned it into a master’s degree.”

“You have two degrees then?”

“Uh three, I went on to do a doctoral degree.”

“You are so clever, Lady Cameron.”

“Not really, I just put in the hours, bit of a plodder really.”

“But you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

“Doctor of philosophy, in biological science—acting professor.”

“My goodness and you’re a plodder?”

“Yes, two of my girls are far cleverer than I am, Trish and Sammi.”

“Well they must have got it from you or your husband.”

Realising that if I said they were adopted I’d give her ammunition for gossip for the next three lifetimes, I simply shrugged. “Sammi’s brilliant with computers, she does loads for the bank in cyber protection. I’d love her to do a PhD but she’s too busy with work and her social life. Trish is really into physics and maths and I think if she wanted to she could get into any university she wanted, she’s precocious and could well be ready by fourteen to apply to Cambridge. It frightens me to death.”

“Fourteen? Isn’t that a bit young?”

“She’s verging on genius level, I have to get some colleagues from the university to coach her as she’s far above the physics and maths they teach at any secondary school.”

“Really? Aren’t people who are that clever sometimes a bit unbalanced?”

“I don’t think she is, she can be challenging because she sees or understands things far more quickly than most people, I mean all this week she’s been wanting to get to school early but she wouldn’t tell me why. This afternoon, she’d showed me what she’d been up to. She and a group of friends had produced one of these rap songs about the nativity and while she sang the song the others performed a dance about the words she was singing.”

“They did a dance about the nativity—the birth of Jesus? Isn’t that tantamount to blasphemy?”

“No because it wasn’t disrespectful of the Christian myth, not that it ever probably happened in the first place. I mean the story of the slaughter of all the male children by Herod is a fiction, there’s no mention of it in any historical sources and he did some pretty awful things but that would have been noted by his contemporaries and as a biologist, I’m afraid while parthenogenesis does happen in vertebrates it doesn’t in mammals, and if it were to happen, the baby would have to be female as the mother would only have X chromosomes to offer. So if the virgin birth happened, Jesus would have been female.”

“Fancy that, it’s amazing what an education can teach you.”