The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3263 by Angharad Copyright© 2020 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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Once I got home, I checked with Hannah that she was okay about her period and she smiled back and said she was fine. I also suggested that if I couldn't help, Stella might, being a nurse and a biological female I didn't add. "It's okay, Mummy, I'm coping and with your help, we'll be fine. Auntie Stella may be a nurse, but you're my mum." She strolled off to finish her homework before I could do anything but gasp. These kids were something else and I wondered what I'd done to deserve them, but I was glad I'd got them.

With the lockdown, Julie and Phoebe couldn't come to visit us, but we spoke regularly on the phone and had even Zoomed a few times. It wasn't the same as seeing them face to face, but it was better than nothing and the littlies loved it. I also booked in for a trim with Julie for when the lockdown was stopped but she just told me to ask Stella if I was urgent and she confided that Stella was actually a very competent cutter. I was pleased she'd said that because I'd felt that ever since she had first cut my hair that fateful day she knocked me off my bike and into my female life. I would never be able to thank her for that at the same time I wasn't that keen on sitting in a car that was she was driving as she continued to frighten the haggis out of me.

When I asked her over dinner if she could trim my hair she nodded and then said anyone else? and they all put their hands up. I saw her swallow and blush slightly. However, after a cuppa, she duly cut my hair and put in some more blonde highlights and while I was waiting to be washed out, she cut all the little one's hair, then trimmed Danni's and put in bright pink highlights and left the blushing teen sitting next to me in the kitchen.

Of course, Trish wanted them but in green to match her school uniform, so did Hannah and Livvie, just to be different asked if hers could be red or blue. When I was about to say something, I was told to get with it. I shut up and let Stella finish with my locks and then I could go and hide in my study. I suppose, I shouldn't really complain, they could have dyed all their hair one silly colour or multiple ones. I nearly ran over one of our students earlier when she crossed a road junction without looking and she was a vision in black clothing with fishnet stockings and bright purple hair. Perhaps I am a little out of date.

I thanked Stella on mine and the girl's behalf, she shrugged and then tidied up the hair of her own two girls, neither of whom had any colour changes despite the girls asking for them. It was something of a puzzle that Stella had her girls go to a different school to the convent mine attended, when questioned about it she simply said she sent them where she felt they got the best education though as far as I could see, the school they went to was less well regarded than St Claire's. Oh well, that was her business I suppose but it niggled me at times though why I couldn't really say. Maybe she wanted them to attend a non-religious school, though mine had managed to survive without too many problems caused by any religious conflict between me and the school, my response being that agnosticism was good enough for Darwin, so it was good enough for me.

Thinking of the great man, I saw that someone had taken two of his notebooks about twenty years ago and felt very angry about it. Surely, no one could ever collect on the theft as the items were unique, and therefore anyone who bought them, would be unable to show them in a collection, so why steal them? And from whom were they stealing them? Not just Cambridge University, who should be ashamed for losing the precious artefacts, but the whole world as these objects were irreplaceable. I hoped the thief rotted in hell as well as in this life, which was a slight contradiction in my beliefs.

To my mind, Darwin's books were sacred texts, much more so than bits of papyrus from the first centuries AD. We knew who wrote the former but not the latter and also the reasoning behind it. Understanding evolution, one of the main drivers in nature was far more important than religious belief, which only reflected upon the inadequacy of humans, who had the capacity to become gods when they cooperated rather than worship inexplicable beings who had no basis in any factual evidence at all and then elevated an insignificant preacher to the godhead, with similar lack of any evidence to support it. To my mind, it demonstrated the triumph of superstition over critical thought. Still, that sort of sums up humanity, irrational to the nth degree.

I considered my own experiences and for instance the healing we sent to Henry or that I had directly been involved in. I steadfastly refused to believe in supernatural events of any sort and grouped my so-called experiences of dealings with the goddess as being some sort of brain fart or dream state. Often the memories were fuzzy anyway and could easily be construed to be some sort of daydream rather than a real experience and it was well known that we have difficulty distinguishing between them, especially vivid ones plus it is also well established that people can fool themselves into thinking something happened if they desire it enough or to have it implanted in their memories by others, such as in false memory syndrome, which I was sure was what happened in many so-called mass experiences claimed by religion to be evidence. Evidence of what though, was another matter. Hysteria is another heightened situation in which unreal events can appear to happen the same with the unreliability of humans as witnesses to events. Plus the manipulation of such events by individuals or groups to further their own ends.

We were living in times which had so much data flying around and of which a significant amount was questionable. Presidential elections had been fought and won using questionable material. Disputes were still being fought sometimes with no evidence being offered at all, but thanks to social media, millions believed it. There were numbers of people who believed the 5G network carried Coronavirus when there was no evidence to show how or why?

Morons in the developing world were preaching that vaccines to stop polio being offered by humanitarian groups funded by the likes of Bill Gates, were really drugs to make them infertile or some other such nonsense. These were on the same scale of nonsense that had people believing that ground rhino horn or pangolin scales held magical qualities and led to poaching and increased likelihood of extinction for these species. Many folk medicines were based upon equally unreliable evidence or purely on the anecdotal variety and people misunderstanding correlation of two unrelated things as cause and effect. Such as it rained on Thursday and I had a headache on Thursday, so the rain caused my headache. Clearly, they aren't linked except they both happened on Thursday and it would be equally unwise to link either to the fact that I have headaches on Thursdays, so it must be the day which caused them. Fallacious reasoning happens in all types of human experience partly because there is no scientific or logical method involved and the facts aren't investigated properly or fully.

When I was teaching, I used to spend hours trying to make students aware of looking at data critically and not making correlations without checking things fully and even then not drawing conclusions when there weren't any, such as tabloid newspapers and politicians do all the time. Even scientists do it when they become too involved in the thing they are investigating and lose objectivity.

I was involved in these thoughts when Trish tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Daddy is on the phone, why don't you answer it?" I jumped out of my skin, not having heard it despite it being in the same room, so deep in thought was I.

"Hello?" I said picking up the handset.

"Hi Babes, I'm hoping to get home as soon as lockdown will let me. So should be home for your birthday."

"You will?" I asked trying to work out what he was on about.

"Yeah, lockdown is supposed to be over on the second and your birthday is on the third. So I can come home for your birthday."

"Right," I replied, "Oh that will be good." I was still trying to bring my mind out of its philosophical bent and try to link it with the now. It didn't want to do so. I glanced at my desk calendar and saw that next Wednesday was the second of December and therefore Thursday must be my birthday. Shit, perhaps I was going to have a headache because it was Thursday after all.

"Yeah, isn't it?" he continued on the phone and I felt momentarily lost.