The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3228 by Angharad Copyright© 2017 Angharad

”They said there’d be snow at Christmas; they said there’d be peace on earth...” droned one of my favourite Christmas songs as I contemplated Christmas. It had snuck up on me again and I had presents to buy, wrap and distribute under the Christmas tree. I’ll never forget the first one I had here at Daddy’s house, when I ended up with pine needles in a very uncomfortable place. A few litres of water have gone under the bridge since then. I can also recall the day that Trish came and she nearly died of joy when we gave her her own dolly and pram. That she could choose her own clothes to buy and be accepted for who she felt she was rather than a name on a birth certificate.

I had a week to sort out Christmas, find a solution to Brexit and help Trish build a reactor to produce nuclear fusion—without blowing up the planet. We also had a dormouse with us, one that the technicians could neither get to eat enough to hibernate or to hibernate.

Toby had been invited for Christmas dinner with Simon’s full agreement, in fact he suggested it, much to my astonishment. He just asked one night if my ‘copper friend’ had a girlfriend and when I said I didn’t know for certain but was pretty sure he didn’t, he suggested I invite him for Christmas dinner. On the understanding we don’t spend all afternoon discussing his current unsolved crime—‘nice bloke but needs the brains from this place to solve them,’ then he laughed at his own joke.

“Well Trish and Sammi are pretty well off the scale when it comes to IQ measurement,” I retorted proudly.

“More to life than IQs you know?”

“I’m well aware of that, Einstein had a huge one but was wrong almost as often as he was right.”

“Are we talking Albert or Trish, here?”

“Not Trish, him with the funny hair cut.”

“Ah, I can help there,” said my hubby.

“Help where?”

“I reckon that when he discovered E=MC2 it made his hair stand on end and it stayed that way.”

“I watched Brian Cox on the telly the other night,” I remarked thinking of the equation.

“Oh, him with the big brain in Manchester?”

“Yeah, he did some lecture at the Royal Institution on the science in Dr Who back in 2013...”

“Had to travel back in time to see it did you?”

“Ha ha, no it was on iPlayer, he was saying why time travel is impossible in the science we know today because we can only go forward at the speed of light. We’d need something like a black hole to cause the light to deviate.”

“Get Trish to knock you up one.”

“Look, what are we getting the girls for Christmas?”

“What about you? What would you like?” he asked me.

“I don’t need anything, darling, except perhaps to see you a bit more often and watch the girls grow and set off on their own careers.”

“Only, I happen to know of a brand new Range Rover, the streamlined one, Evoque or whatever they call ‘em.”

“What do I need one of those for?”

“When you’re doing your fieldwork...”

“In which case one of the Defender sorts would be more useful than a Chelsea tractor.”

“Okay, I’ll get you one of those.”

“I mean if I turned up on a field trip in a Range Rover they’d all think we were going shooting.”

“Okay you made your point. What about the girls?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“Would they like a brand....”

“Don’t be silly, they’re all too young to drive except Jacqui and she has a perfectly drivable Audi, you got it for her, remember?”

“Oh the A3, yeah, nice little motor.”

“If we got them all new laptops, that would mean they were treated equally, I mean Danielle, Trish, Livvie, Hannah, Meems and Cate.”

“Could do or get them the latest iPhone.”

“They’re over a thousand pounds, isn’t that a bit excessive seeing as we could get reasonable spec laptops for much less than that, besides they all seem quite happy with their Samsung things, except the batteries run down so quickly. Come to think of it so does my Black Berry.”

“They’re making phones again.”

“Who?”

“Black Berry.”

“I didn’t know they’d ever stopped.”

“Don’t you keep up to date on anything these days, woman?”

“Yes, I’ve read the State of UK birds plus the last three or four reports about pesticides and insect loss.”

“I mean what’s happening in the real world, not some field in Panama.”

“Simon, what I read is about the real world, not the playground of the Bank of England old boys’ school.”

“Hey, what d’you mean by that?”

“Money is useful but it won’t be if there’s nothing to buy with it because we’ve killed everything except other people and that would probably be happening as well.”

“You’re too pessimistic, Cathy. Science will sort it as well as climate change. I mean what about that forest in Borneo that’s growing bigger because of global warming?”

“I think I’d like to see the data for that because I suspect they got something wrong somewhere.”

“How could you tell?”

“Various ways but the quickest is probably via satellite data from one of NASA’s Terra satellites.”

“Terror—they that frightening?”

“Very funny, Terra as in firma. They could do some LAI analyses.”

“What analyses?”

“Leaf Area Index, plus some measureable photographs.”

“What is leaf whatever index.”

“It’s a measure of the density of the tree or other vegetative canopies.”

“And they can tell that from a satellite?”

“Yes, to a rough calculation, yes. They use a MODIS system.”

“A what?”

“MODIS which stands for Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer.”

“Not a very good acronym, is it?”

“It is NASA...”

“Okay, point taken, what’s a spectro-thingy-meter, sounds like something James Bond should be dealing with.”

“That’s SPECTRE.”

“Bet you can’t tell me what that stands for.”

“You’d have taken my money very easily because I have no idea what it means nor care.”

“Special Executive for Counter Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.” He added, ‘Ta dah’ and bowed. I felt like saying it was the most irrelevant piece of information I’d ever heard of but that would have burst his balloon and he does like to show his cleverness every now and again. I suppose he’s been reading a James Bond book or watched a film recently.

“How did you remember that?”

“The little grey cells,” he said trying to sound like Hercule Poirot but was actually more like Clousseau.

“If your memory is that good, how come you forgot Julie’s birthday?”

“Who’s Julie?” he said, “Who are you? I can’t remember anything, everything is blank.”

“So you won’t remember agreeing to pay for the servicing of her car for the next three years then?”

“What? I didn’t did I?”

“You did,” well actually I did on his behalf, he was just paying for it.

“Perhaps I am getting forgetful.”

“You must be, you promised to take Danni to football training tonight.”

“What? I’ve got a meeting.”

“Well take the train and I’ll ask Julie or Stella to drive her in your car.”

“No way, Jose.”

“Well you can explain to her why you’re reneging on a promise.”

“Can’t you take her?”

“In your car?”

“No, use your own.”

“But she wanted to go in yours.”

He obviously thought better of letting his sister drive. “You’ll have to take me to the station then.”

“Fine, what time train is it...”

“How did you manage that, Mummy?” asked our football wonder.

“I negotiated, all right?”

“I love this car,” she said sitting in the F type and acting as if she was minor royalty.

“It is rather nice.”

“I still can’t believe he said you could borrow it.”

I could, fear is a very powerful emotion and he is scared by Stella’s driving.