The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3104 by Angharad Copyright© 2017 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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By the time I realised it was Monday morning Simon had left for work early, presumably to speak with Sammi. I on the other hand, had to deal with a car load of schoolgirls and the little ones, getting them all ready for school or to be taken to mother and toddler group—this was Lizzie, the youngest of the children and soon to go to nursery—which is of course at the convent.

At the moment I have to pay someone to take her and stay with her when she comes home, a nice woman called Gail Sayle—don’t, she’s married so it’s entirely her own fault. She has a daughter of her own and I drop her off en route to school and nursery, the latter Cate attends. When Lizzie goes there our children will make up half the school—or it feels like it.

That’s Danni, Trish, Livvie, Meems, Cate and soon Lizzie as well. I get a loyalty discount and the school gets five scholarships a year from the bank. Either way it wins, though if you recall, Cindy gets a scholarship which is most of her fees paid if not all. She’s a nice kid, very polite and helpful though we haven’t seen her recently so I wonder if she and Danielle have had a bust up. I hope not, mind you I haven’t had time to do a sewing bee for a while, perhaps later this week I’ll sus Danni out on it this evening.

Life at the university was getting no easier and the financial squeeze that seemed to be happening in everything these days, made it much harder. I was constantly being asked where we could save money by the administration that I complained to Tom about it. Compared to many of the more established universities, we were relatively new kids on the block and although we were doing several exciting things in research, they weren’t as yet bringing in lots of money. What we needed was something like graphene which would make lots of news and bring in the investors and hopefully money from patents.

Until then, I had to try and hide my departmental assets from the auditors and encourage what may prove fiscally useful research or discoveries. One of my departments had got a bid to make some sort of robot to analyse soil samples on Mars using lasers and spectrometers—it was going to cost the ESA about quarter of a million pounds, so that stimulated an enquiry from India for some space equipment or electronic telescope thing. Rumours are that we might hear from the Chinese government sometime this year to do something similar for them. Apparently, our physics department are very good at making mirrors which are polished by computer and then finished by the professor himself by hand—he’s got some sort of knack for doing it and they’re better than anything coming from NASA, so he always has one or two orders on the go. It paid for his new polishing machine which was about a hundred thousand pounds.

Before he came under my management, the machine had already been ordered. When I took over the super department of science, I was told to cancel the order but after talking to him, told him to carry on as he reckoned he’d be in credit with it in two years.

It was interesting because as you know I’m not a mathematician, so physics is something I struggle with. Lots of my colleagues knew this too and I had to learn some equations and other things very quickly to stop them trying to embarrass me or take the piss. They all thought I’d been promoted because Tom, the vice chancellor, was my dad, so it was good old nepotism. That might apply to the Whitehouse but not my university. I got the job because I had shown my mettle in dismissing the previous administration and practically running the council of the university and in uncovering some scams that had lost a great deal of money. However, some of that was kept quiet to try and stop the reputation of the place from dropping through the floor—if students stop enrolling because they think you’re all crooks, the place would be up the proverbial without a paddle in two years.

So when the professor of physics was seen to be talking to me and telling everyone that I was woman of integrity because I’d supported his mirror machine, some of the other departments in my group began to warm to me a little.

Remember I don’t use my married name in my professional life and I assumed that everyone knew what it was anyway, but apparently not. So when Simon sold some shares he’d made millions on, he donated much of it to funding a field studies centre at the university to run in parallel with the one at the woodland reserve we had. As it was a personal donation not one from the bank—he really did make a killing—he got to have it named after him once it was finished. Instead, he asked for it to be called after Billie so that’s what we did.

When the money was offered to the university neither Tom nor I could respond for the university in case of charges of conflict of interest, so the Chancellor himself accepted the donation on our behalf. I was then told to make it happen.

I did have the unpleasant experience of overhearing a conversation between two of the teaching staff, not mine I hasten to add, who seemed to suggest that I must have slept with the donor to get the money for a new facility. At the time I was with Diane and we were queuing for our jacket potato for lunch in the refectory. Boy, didn’t she say something.

“Are you implying that Professor Watts slept with the bank director who funded the new field study facility?” she demanded.

“What if we are?” was the reply.

“Well you’d be quite right—she did it lots of times.”

At first the two men blushed and then sniggered the one even patting the other on the shoulder. As Diane had not been terribly discreet in the volume of her voice, she had quite an audience when she administered the coup de grace.

“They sleep together every night, they’re married you gossiping morons.” The two men were laughed out of the room and I must admit I felt like leaving as well.

Nothing else happened except the campus got more muddy as they continued to build our field study centre and life returned to the usual level of chaos and total panic.

I collected the convent mob including Cate in the people carrier thing, looked like the Jaguar would be for weekends, it just wasn’t big enough for all the little bodies I had to convey to and from the convent. Danni was cock-a-hoop, she’d had a text from the FA to attend for a training session for England women’s team the following weekend. She sent a text to me and her dad who must have told Henry because once he knew it was to be held at Wembley, he told her to catch the train up and he’d meet her at Clapham Junction and take her across town to the training session. The squad would stay at a hotel onsite and she’d text him on Sunday and he’d come and get her and run her home. He wanted to see me about something anyway.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the second part because it usually meant work for me but there we are, that’s life.