The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2970 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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The weeks seemed to be flying by. I glanced at the calendar in my study and realised to my horror that Tuesday next was the longest day, the summer solstice. It made me sit up for a moment. It hasn’t been a particularly good summer so far and the other day we had thunderstorms and torrential rain and in a few days time, the evenings would start drawing in again. Wonderful—not.

I thought back to days before I met and married into this madcap family of even madder Scottish aristocrats. This time of year, unless I was doing some sort of field work, like looking for glow-worms or collecting moths, I’d be out on my bike, often knocking out twenty miles or more per night and double that at weekends. Nowadays, I was lucky to get a short ride in once a week, sometimes less. No wonder I was so unfit.

I did think of getting the girls to ride to school. I’d go with them and collect them to come home but we’d each get a few miles each day of exercise which had to be better than sitting in traffic. I looked up the forecast for Monday—rain. So that’s the end of that idea.

Why was I sitting in my study at six o’clock on a Saturday morning? I couldn’t sleep. It gets light about half past four and sometimes it wakes me up, other times I manage to ignore it. Today I couldn’t for some reason and lying there trying to sleep reminded me I needed a wee and once up I decided to make a cuppa. I was the only one up—unless you include our psychotic kitten, who demanded breakfast then went straight back to bed after eating it. I was tempted to sling her outside for a while except it could endanger local wildlife populations. So I left her to it and decided to try and get through some work on the mammal survey.

I remembered they were doing a dormouse survey today. I helped out last time because they were short, but apparently today they were well provided with checkers, so I could stay home and catch up on things, spend time with the girls or go out on my bike.

It had been quite a damp week with heavy showers yesterday and Thursday being one of the sort of days that frightened Noah, I realised that the woods would be very wet—underfoot at least. If I’d gone, Trisha and Danielle would want to come too and as Danielle is in the England squad for next week means she doesn’t need to slip and hurt herself. I finished my tea and thought about a ride. I snuck upstairs and got my riding clothes and was down again before anyone noticed.

I clomped out as quietly as I could to the garage and checked over the Specialized before mounting it and gently pedalling down to the gate. I’d recently acquired some flashing lights for back and front of the bike which were LEDs and like the daylight lights on new cars. My Jaguar lights up like a Christmas tree with LED lights which come on automatically as soon as you switch on the ignition.

The sky almost threatened to let some sun shine but changed its mind and remained overcast, occasionally letting the odd spot of rain plop on me—that reminded me of my encounter with Stella, the first one. I really couldn’t believe how she catapulted me into a hedge and then into womanhood. I owed her a great deal, like a husband and ninety three kids, plus would Tom have invited an effeminate male student to share his house with them—I very much doubt it.

So he knew about my transgenderism before I told him because my professor at Sussex, Esmond Herbert, had hinted about it in a letter to Tom. He also told him I was the best student he’d had for many a year, especially on fieldwork. Tom who’d had a transgender daughter who’d been killed in a car crash twenty years before was more excited by the fact that I was into fieldwork as they had dormouse stuff that needed to be done and no one to do it, the person who’d started it having left.

Tom was and probably still is an inspiring teacher although his style is somewhat different to my own, so I was glad to study under him for my master’s degree and then to continue on to my doctoral degree. I started with him as a man or should that be boy, because I didn’t have a male puberty either because I damaged the major sources of testosterone or had them damaged, or I’m androgen insensitive—which doesn’t mean I don’t like men, more that my body doesn’t recognise male hormones. Consequently, by age twenty three I was already slightly female shaped, with broader hips and narrower shoulders than most men and starting to get even more so after starting female hormones prior to my transition. Thinking about it, it wasn’t really surprising that lots of people thought I was female even before I transitioned, especially with my hair, well down below my shoulders and it was thick hair too, not weedy like lots of men have. I had little or no body hair and no muscle definition, even in my legs, despite all the cycling I did.

I rode to Portsmouth from Brighton to hear Tom lecture and asked him one or two questions afterwards, then introduced myself and we chatted and he offered me a place to do my masters with some funding to help it. Even in those days money was tight but not as much as today with austerity and the pound plummeting through the scaremongers at Brexit. Today, I doubt I would be able to offer funding for someone to do a masters, even a PhD would be difficult to support, money is that tight, hence my regular mailing of begging letters to the great and the good, seeking sponsorships or research grants. The money just isn’t about.

Having said that I was talking to a young Polish woman recently and she had come to the UK because she wanted to improve her chances of study, which she felt were better in the UK than Poland. She told me that the government of Poland were even more inept and corrupt than the British government and they were also selling off forests and other natural resources despite everyone in the scientific community telling them not to. As the government of Poland were all right wing psychos, that didn’t somehow surprise me. I think they’re also homophobic which tends to go with being a right wing psycho.

The rain tried a bit harder and I turned the bike back towards home. Cycling had always been important to me as form of transport, exercise and enjoyment—it seemed it was involved with some of the major steps in my life too. Instead of worrying me, it cheered me up and I arrived back after a quick twenty miles being a bit damp but otherwise none the worse for my early ride.