The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2971 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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“Where have you been, Mummy?” demanded Trish.

“Where d’you think?” Given that I was wearing cycling kit and carrying my dripping helmet, it wasn’t exactly a difficult question.

“Is it raining or have you been swimming, Mummy?”

“No I just cycled over to the Isle of Wight and back.”

“Did you see any mackerel, Gramps likes them.”

He’s not the only one, kiddo. “Nah, they kept jumping out of my pockets.”

“Oh, didn’t you bash them on the head first—isn’t that what fishermen do?”

“One’s caught on a line, perhaps, but not the ones they catch in nets.”

“How do they kill them then?”

“If I dropped you into the water what would happen?”

“I’d swim back to land.”

Try again. “If you were too far from land, what would happen?”

“I’d keep swimming until I got to land.”

“You wouldn’t, you’d drown if a shark didn’t get you first.”

“No, I’d keep swimming. A boat might rescue me.”

“Most ships wouldn’t see you, a tiny dot in an ocean of grey. You’d drown which is what happens to the fish.”

She sniggered, “How can a fish drown, you need water to do that?”

“Fish are designed to breathe the air in water, they have special organs called gills which enable them to do so. Out of water, they can’t breathe, so they die.”

“But that sounds silly, Mummy.”

“It might but it’s true. Some fish have an ability to breathe on dry land, like the mudskipper, but most can’t and just die.”

“So the fishermen don’t bash them?”

“They don’t need to plus if they’ve just dumped half a ton of fish onto the deck of a trawler, they wouldn’t have time. They sort them, chuck what they don’t want back over the side, and gut and freeze the rest.”

“They gut them—what does that mean?”

“They slice up the bellies with a sharp knife and pull out all their guts and chuck them overboard.”

“Why?”

“Would you want to eat what the fish last had to eat?”

“Uh no.”

“The fish keep better and are easier to sell.”

“Ugh,” she said walking away, “TMI,” she said over her shoulder.

“Oh, I thought we could have fish tonight.”

“Bah,” she called and ran off.

I showered and changed. After dressing I came back down to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. I saw some sausages and quite fancied a sausage sandwich, so started frying a dozen of them. As the smell wafted upstairs I soon had a kitchen full of vultures queuing up for a sausage sarnie. This was accompanied by a variety of sauces ranging from tomato ketchup to HP, a quite spicy brown sauce, which as far as I know, still has the Houses of Parliament on the label. I had some ketchup on mine and it was delicious.

David when he arrived wasn’t so impressed, apparently the sausages were intended for dinner the next day. I didn’t think there’d be enough anyway but he was the expert. I told him to stop complaining and buy some more—I paid for it anyway. I was about to learn the sausages were the last ones made by some butcher chap who lived on a farm outside Gosport, who’d died a couple of days ago. No one else could make them like him.

I was tempted to make jokes but David seemed genuinely upset, so I held fire. Just as well, it appears he was an old friend of David’s. I made him a cup of tea and he grumbled to himself. Okay, so he’d have to replan a meal, whoopee-doo. It’s my house, my food and so forth. I have every right to eat it if I want, I paid for it. Seeing as we had half a pig in the freezer, from the same farmer, I was tempted to tell him to go and make his own, except we didn’t have a sausage machine, nor enough spare bread, which they use for padding the sausages out and improving the texture of the meat.

The sausages we’d just eaten, were very filling. I only had one in a slice of bread but it certainly kept me from feeling hungry. Apparently, they have a high meat content, which means high protein. Protein takes longer to digest than carbohydrate and was the basis of the now largely discredited Atkins diet. I don’t know if it would increase the risk of gout, which is caused by the body being unable to properly metabolise purines, a form of protein found in many regularly eaten foodstuffs.

I left David to it and went into the study where Trish came in and asked if Julie could cut her hair. “Have you asked her?”

“She told me it needed cutting.”

“Okay.”

She skipped off as I recalled the first day they met and Trish unwittingly disclosed her history to Julie who was also transgender and neither had guessed the other, which I found unusual. Most of us can recognise another from about five miles away. Having said that, the youngsters who transition early, if they’re put on blockers, can be almost indistinguishable from their biological sisters. One of the reasons for doing it early.

According to an article in the Sunday Times, Rupert Everett apparently thought he was transgender from age six to eleven, or something like that and was glad he didn’t do anything about it. He grew up to be a gay man. Assuming the story to be true, he would fit into the received wisdom that most children to believe themselves to be gender variant do not go on to develop transsexualism, but become gay. Providing they are being supervised by someone who knows what they’re doing, not too many of them end up in the wrong bodies after gender reassignment.

It does happen, people do have surgery because they were misdiagnosed or mistaken and no matter how strict the guidelines are, the odd one will fall through the cracks because people do. I’ve read that some people go on insisting they want surgery even when their psychiatrist has told them they thought it would be a mistake, only to find they regret it a few years down the line.

The nature of transsexualism, more so than transgenderism, means that all the symptoms are reported by the patient, who can fool the doctors and surgeons and perhaps themselves to get a wrong diagnosis and thus treatment. It’s obviously a tragedy if it happens because things which have been removed can’t be replaced—not as a functioning item.

In order to maintain such guidelines it sometimes means genuine sufferers have to wait a bit longer to make sure they have been correctly assessed and diagnosed, a bit like having to get to the airport early to minimise the risk of bombs or other items used by terrorists actually getting on the plane. It’s a total pain but better than dying.

Trish came back to show me her haircut, it wasn’t a lot different, just tidier. I told her i approved and she beamed me a smile and went off. Julie came in and I said she’d done a good job on Trish’s hair.

“What? I haven’t done it yet.”

I’ll murder that child...