The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2910 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 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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After the relatively delightful weather of Good Friday, Easter Saturday was a mixture of blustery showers and the odd sunny period. This gave rise to the main act of the storm. On Easter Sunday, the primeval forces of nature decided that having bank holidays was some sort of offence that required punishment, the sentence—wet and windy. The rain and hail smashed against the windows waking me several times, then as the day dawned, a fleeting sunny period and more blasts of gale force showers and hail.

David actually trotted across from his cottage and flung himself in through the kitchen door just as the next precipitation precipitated, but sort of sideways—so is that precipitation? I suppose ultimately big blobs of water are heavier than air and thus precipitate, so that’s what it was. At one point I went out to retrieve our bird feeder thing: a plastic and metal hopper device in which I put seeds which only the pigeons seem to eat partly because they scare off the sparrows and other smaller birds, simply by their size. I don’t think pigeons are aggressive, except perhaps to other pigeons, compared to most other birds. I’ve seen blackbirds going at it hell for leather, sparrows squabbling on the ground and robins attempting to knock seven bells out of each other. It must be spring. Thankfully humans don’t act in this way, or we’d all be born in December—like I was—oops.

Of course being a big religious festival, some psychopath blew themselves up in a park in Lahore killing seventy innocents and apparently Isis or whatever these demons call themselves crucified some catholic priest they’d kidnapped earlier in Yemen. These were the same minded people who blew themselves up in Brussels a few days earlier and whose unspeakable acts leave me doubting their sanity.

Sure, we can all get angry enough to want to kill specific individuals. If a god existed, I’d have killed him when Billie died, then healed him and killed him again until I got fed up. That Christians celebrate their god king’s death and resurrection at Easter, to my mind, demonstrates the power of myth over fact. The stories are written by people who never met the unfortunate Jesus and who never even set foot in Judea or Galilee and about fifty years after the event they claim to describe.

According to Biblical scholars, Jesus expected the Kingdom of God to happen with the end of days and so on, within a short time of his death. Paul, probably the most contemporary of the bible writers, expected the second coming in his life time. They’re still waiting, but facts have never got in the way of a good myth, so they move the goal posts and carry on.

If one looks more spiritually at the message of Jesus, as we have it reported, perhaps his Kingdom did arrive but nobody saw it. If everyone had adopted his message of loving their neighbour—a long held tenet of Judaism, though rarely practised—we could have had paradise on earth for two thousand years. Instead we killed the messenger and continue to kill and abuse each other with monotonous regularity, often claiming authority from on high—despite the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Which part of that short statement do we not understand?

Perhaps one day the earth will be populated by intelligent and compassionate life forms—until then, we have to make do with the most monstrous of all evolutionary forms, mankind, as holding the top place through his ruthlessness and technology.

I watched Jim Al Kalili, a physicist explaining how the universe originated. They still talk about the Big Bang Theory, but the evidence tends to suggest it actually happened. How in less than billionths of a second, the universe went from being a minute, extremely hot nothingness to formations of quarks and gluons and finally to nuclear particles and atoms themselves.

He mentioned how a young Cambridge student described the composition of atoms in the universe, but because she was female she wasn’t even given a degree. Even then her discovery, which was rubbished at first was only accepted after the man who rubbished her discovered she was correct. But then Einstein, him of the brain nearly as big as Trish’s, dismissed an Begian priest cum theoretical physicist and then had to accept he was wrong. This was the man who first suggested the Big Bang though it was called something else and whose theory suggested the universe was expanding but it was only when Hubble demonstrated red shift that Einstein admitted he was wrong. Hubble was weird too, apparently he came from Missouri but affected an English aristocrat’s accent—obviously, what happens when you spend hours looking through telescopes—sort of sky madness.

After a relatively subdued Easter Sunday, watching the heavy showers being driven by the gales, we went to bed and I found it difficult to sleep because of the wind howling in the chimneys or screaming through the telephone wires. Of course Simon goes off as soon as his head touches the pillow. He reckons he learnt to sleep with any sort of noise around him after being in dormitories at school. Whereas I find it difficult with any extraneous sound, so howling gales and driving rain wakes me up or stops me sleeping.

At one point I was doing the crossword on my iPad, which meant I didn’t need to switch on the bedside light and disturb sleeping beauty. It was one in the morning before I felt sufficiently tired to sleep through anything. Then as if to prove me wrong I heard an unearthly groaning noise which went on for a few moments and brought me back to full wakefulness and was followed by a further loud groan and a loud crashing noise.

My immediate reaction was to sit up in bed and think, ‘Oh shit we’ve got a tree down.’ Crashing noise—bugger it’s hit something. I rushed out of bed and looked through the window. We have loads of trees in the garden and along the driveway.

“Wossup?” asked a sleepy Simon who must have felt me get out of bed.

“We’ve got a tree down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said before closing his eyes again, then sitting bolt upright and asking, “It hasn’t hit the car has it?”

“I can’t see what it’s hit.” I slipped into the girl’s room and saw that an elderly ash tree had dropped a huge branch on David’s cottage. I sped back into our room and started dressing. “C’mon, sleepy head, David’s house has been hit.”

“What?” he gasped and sat up again. He paused as if to process what I’d said before scrambling out of bed. “Wait for me,” he called as I rushed down the stairs. I wasn’t going anywhere without him despite my concerns that David could be injured. It was safer with two, if only to have someone who could call for help.

Tom came down yawning, in dressing gown and slippers. “Whit’s goin’ on?” he asked.

“There’s a tree down on David’s cottage.”

“I’ll go an’ dress,” he said rushing up the stairs moments before Simon came down them. We pulled on coats and opening the door prepared to venture out into the storm.