The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 32423 by Angharad Copyright© 2018 Angharad

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I didn't really want to involve Tom, he was retired and should have been playing in his vegetable garden with his grandchildren, but he wasn't he was sitting at a dinner table and knew that something was up.

"Are ye gang tae tell me or do I hae tae get ma torture kit oot?"

"You're not seriously going to torture Mummy, are you Gramps?" asked Trish.

"Why, whit's it tae ye?" he fired back at her.

"Can we watch?" she replied deadpan. There were days when I really did wonder about my daughter. Was she joking or was she genuinely wanting to see something she hadn't before and that sense of curiosity overcame any sentiment. She did once want to dissect the cat when she was younger and it took me a while to get her to understand it's an offence and offensive. She couldn't seem to see that you need a home office licence to vivisection any live mammal.

"Aye if ye like," said Tom, "but ainly if ye help me clean up thae blud efterwards."

"Will there be lots?" she asked and he nodded. "Not that keen on blood, Gramps, so I may pass on this one." So saying she withdrew and the others followed her, mainly to chide her either for wanting to watch the session or chickening out over blood. She doesn't much like the sight of it and I agree with her, I don't either and the older I get the more squeamish I become.

We discussed what was going on at the university and at one point I thought Tom was suffering a bout of apoplexy, he went purple and a slight froth appeared at the edges of his mouth. Then he calmed down and sipped the water I passed to him.

"If ainly I wis younger, I'd call him out and break his neck fa' him, thae moron."

"Well sadly you're not and he'd probably break yours, so this is my fight and I'm doing it via the constitution and with Jason's help." We'd had word he could attend on the Monday morning as his case had ended that afternoon, when he successfully prosecuted a woman who had murdered her two little girls because they got in the way of her social life. I hate to think how she could do such a thing but these people who seem to have no value for anything but themselves and no conscience about who they hurt.

Tom seemed to cheer up when he heard Jason was helping me. He even offered to pay something towards his fee, but I said Simon was covering my costs, although he wasn't yet aware of it. Tom gave me an old fashioned look then relaxed. What's the point in being a member of one of the wealthiest families in Europe if you can't spend a few pounds here and there?

Diane sent me an email which detailed the agenda of the meeting of the council and so far we had ten of its members agreeing to attend. Of the science faculty, only Professor Adams had said he wouldn't attend, and suggested that he hadn't given me permission to either. I sent him an email pointing out the error of his ways and also informing him that as the constitution could not be suspended or changed without the agreement of the university council, he had no authority to make such decisions, in fact as head of the science faculty, he did what I told him until the council said otherwise.

He wrote back suggesting I may be in error. I suggested he speak to my legal counsel if he wished to query it. That seemed to satisfy him, or frighten him, I am not sure which and cared even less.

Another of the non-attending members was to be Professor Maude, the other of the VC's heads of super faculties, this time the arts, and he offered no fight, just suggesting our meeting was irrelevant as the Vice Chancellor was running things.

"You can't keep getting rid of them, Cathy, just because you don't see eye to eye with them," was his minor reprimand with which I disagreed. I saw no problem with the motto I had on my desk in work, 'Be reasonable, do it my way.'

I also had one on my desk at home which stated, 'Rule 1: The boss is always right. Rule 2: In the event of any disagreement, rule 1 apples.' At times I did think of changing the sign from 'boss' to 'Trish'. In fact, I was quite surprised someone hadn't already done that.

After our discussion, Tom went off to his study and presumably his tot of whisky what I didn't realise was he was also on the phone to Jason and then to Simon; the latter wasn't expected home until the next day through business commitments--he was part of a business group trying to prevent a no deal Brexit and was meeting with other CEOs and directors. I believed that Henry was also likely to be there.

I once teased him that as a capitalist he should be ready to make a fortune out of it like several members of the government. He went absolutely ape and lectured me for half an hour on the numbers of decent people who would lose their jobs or businesses because of the single mindedness of the current government who cared about nothing but themselves. It seemed we had a surfeit of those types of people at present, including in academia.

The water had barely finished running in the cistern of our en suite, when he rang. I was going to bed to read my book, 'The Emerald Planet,' by David Beerling. I was learning quite a bit about how plants had changed the climate of the earth and enabled the rest of us to evolve. It was also interesting to see how the climate generally controlled itself by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not quite as Lovelock suggested in his Gaia theory, but for many millions of years the carbon was controlled by green plants, especially trees assisted by the marine algae which deposits it as carbonates on the sea bed. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it's very interesting. However, they all acknowledge that climate is changing very quickly, faster than it has for at least a million years--as attested by the ice samples from the Antarctic and the amounts of 12C carbon.

"I've told Jason to destroy this idiot in the university," was Simon's opening statement.

"I'm quite capable of telling him myself."

"I know, but if I'm paying the piper, I call the tune."

Suit yourself, I nearly responded but instead thanked him for his support and made a mental note to take it up with Tom at breakfast, I didn't need Simon involved except to sign the cheque at the end. Simon told me that Tom was intending to come to the meeting as well. As a professor emeritus, he was entitled to but only to speak if he was invited to.

After this discussion I asked him how his meeting had gone and he sounded concerned that the dirty tricks brigade were already busy in trying to influence Brexit supporters to ignore the facts which the Remainers were publishing and to believe the unicorns of the government run by the blond bombast. As it had worked last time, I couldn't see them changing their tack, and as no one stopped them, they'd carry on doing what they did before even if it was illegal. It was just nice that the LibDems had taken Brecon from the Tories to make parliamentary life slightly less comfortable for the government and their majority of one in the Commons.

It made life interesting as in the old Chinese curse, which I learned was total rubbish and was invented by someone in the 1960s or 70s. All this time I'd thought I was cursed and instead it was conned.