The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2981 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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I woke up sweating with my heart thumping and feeling quite sick. Dreaming of the accident we’d witnessed reminded me of the one I’d had in the Porsche, where it had rolled down the field into the stream. I was so lucky that day—a smaller car and I might have been killed outright or drowned afterwards. I thought of the couple who’d died in their car, a large BMW, who if they were the parents of the girls, can’t have been that old themselves. Then I thought of the girl who died, she can’t have been much older than seven or eight—what chance of life did she have? It reminded me of Daisy and of course of my Billie. Stumbling to the loo, my eyes full of tears I tripped over a pair of shoes I didn’t see and nearly ended up in the wardrobe. I jolted me awake after a wee, I lay there listening to Simon sleeping.

Thankfully, the next day was Sunday and I’d hoped to watch some of the TdF, though life rarely follows my plans which was happened on that day. I rose early as it was dry and bright and dressed in my cycling kit. I slipped downstairs and had a cuppa before pulling on my cycling shoes and sneaking out to the bike shed where I checked over the Specialized and after locking the door, clipped into the pedals and headed up the road towards Hayling Island, which means effectively riding around Langstone Harbour. It was only just six o’clock according to my computer and only the odd dog walker or bird watcher was around.

At Hayling Island I found a shop open which did coffee at a rip off price but bought a cup and rested while I drank it, then set off for home on the reverse of what I’d done on the way out. I was back at eight just in time to shower and get the children up. When Danni learned I’d been out on the bike she was cross with me for not waking her—is she really a teenager? Mind you Hannah was irritated too as she likes to ride with me. While it would be nice to see one or two of them become interested in riding, today I was glad to be able to get out on my own, blow away the cobwebs plus the images from yesterday and my dreams. I felt tired but more relaxed.

The rest of the morning was taken up by pandering to the children and doing things with them. Danni and Trish went off for a run so Livvie, Hannah and Meems helped me do some chores, then we made some cakes and ate the first ones with a drink mid morning.

David came to do dinner and I surrendered the kitchen to him taking the girls off for a walk in the sunshine, though it didn’t feel that warm in the breeze. They all came back with roses in their cheeks just as Phoebe went off with Tom to walk the dog.

Julie was ironing her salon overalls, the smock things she puts over the punters. She washes them once a week unless they get soiled, bringing them home to do it so she can iron them. They have a washing machine at the salon and do the towels there, putting them in the tumble drier afterwards, but she usually does the overalls here. I gave her a cuppa and one of the cakes, David had one too. I mentioned I’d seen Phoebe going out with Tom and she said she’d laddered her last pair of tights so was going down the shop to get a new pair. I told her that I probably had a spare pair she could have had. She simply shrugged and said the exercise would do Phoebe good.

I wondered what had happened between them but perhaps they were just being sisters. Hannah and Livvie started shouting at each other over some CD they each claimed to own. On my intervention they both kept up their claims of ownership, so i asked Julie if she knew whose it was and she said it was hers. Trish came by and I asked her to copy it twice and give one to each of the squabbling sisters and return the original to Julie. Whereupon, Trish laid claim to it and then she and Julie were squabbling. I told her to make three copies and went to hide in my study with my cuppa.

There were probably a dozen things I should have been doing but I logged on to my emails instead and found one from IBM, they were cancelling the research funding due to the Brexit vote and looking to work with a European university, such as Prague. I couldn’t believe it, I was halfway through the paper outlining the research we were proposing to do and what it would cost and it just disappeared in a puff of smoke. That was now four projects we’d lost and even the county council were sending out letters saying they weren’t sure what their financial position would be in the immediate future.

Simon came to see where I was and found me staring at my computer. He read the email and patted me on the shoulder, “I’m afraid everything is now couched in uncertainty and will be for a few years, but no more than fifty or so.” If he was joking I wasn’t laughing. He went off outside to do some gardening having read the paper. I just felt like crying. The department I’d spent a year building up was crumbling before me just because some morons wanted to send a message to government or had nostalgic dreams of a Great Britain that never existed. We had the largest navy in the world until the First World War and the worst admirals, certainly at Jutland we did, where the German fleet escaped through some clever manoeuvring and the incompetence of Jellicoe and Beatty. Nelson would have sunk most of them—though he nearly lost his flagship HMS Victory at Trafalgar, being saved by HMS Temeraire which was immortalised in Turner’s painting of the ship being towed off to its final berth before being scrapped.

I roused myself from my misery. I was fortunate, no matter what happened, Simon had enough money for us to live comfortably which was more than many people had. I had no idea what our withdrawal from the EU would do to university education or to conservation. Everything was now in a state of flux or turmoil. My lack of sleep seemed to catch up with me and I felt tired and hopeless, almost wishing I could wake up and see it was all a bad dream, but it wasn’t—this was real life and somehow we had to sort things out or the younger generation would be even more disadvantaged than we were. Churchill was right about one thing, ‘The best argument against democracy was a five minute conversation with the average voter.’