The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3266 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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My birthday came to an end after Simon treated us all to dinner at the green room, you know, the one at the hotel the bank owns or the family does, perhaps that's the same thing in this case.

The food was good and the children behaved and we came home and went to bed and made love, well Simon did, I fell asleep so he may have considered it to be verging on necrophilia. I was pleased to see him and to be with him again, but I was just so tired. That seems to be the story of my life at present, tiredness and difficulty in coping with the almost surreal quality of life under this stupid virus.

I wonder if we'll ever find out how it got into the system, the bush meat at a market has now been shown to be a lie and the laboratory in Wuhan has been castigated for lax security and apparently they were working with a virus that came from bats. Seeing as the Chinese government were slow to act and compounded things along with half the governments in the world, including our own collection of old Etonian and other assorted public school deadbeats. China is not only impeding investigations into the origins of the pandemic but is also trying to blame everyone else but itself - a symptom of paranoid tyrants syndrome.

Usually by my birthday, I have all the children's Christmas presents organised and together with David have the menus and food requirements organised and planned. This year, I really would be quite happy to sleep from Christmas eve all the way to New Year, the idea of Christmas and Brexit in the same week fills me with dread. But one of the joys of motherhood, is having to nurture your children even when you don't feel like it, so with Danielle's help, I got her to list what my girls wanted for their Christmas presents and I even made sure she understood to keep it real, not stupidly expensive things.

So I compiled a list and was able to order quite a bit from the internet and then spent the rest of the time when not working trying to find the requested items from local retailers. Stella was a slightly reluctant accomplice as were Julie and Phoebe. They'd already had their present, they wanted some sort of laser thing for hair removal and other skin treatments, which cost a couple of thousand pounds, so Simon and I agreed we'd pay half of it and Henry and Tom the rest, rather than them having to take a loan out to buy it.

It's quite frightening the high tech used in beauty therapy these days and their salon get's to look more like something out of Star Trek than ever. They admitted they had struggled, as just about each time they were about to start seeing their clients again, there'd be another lockdown, despite all the PPE they had, masks and aprons, visors and gloves, sterilisation equipment and hand gels, it seemed as if we were dealing with Ebola rather than Covid. Then I read that Covid has been linked to the deaths of over 82,000 people in the UK, which is more than all the UK civilian deaths during World War 2. Our government should be so proud, they must have reduced the pension payouts by millions.

The sunshine in my office window disappeared and was replaced by rain and hail hammering against the glass and predictions of more to come over the next week or so, with it getting cold at Christmas. Still it wasn't the white stuff they'd been having in the States, the way things are at present it wouldn't take much to stop everything and snow could quite easily do that.

Mass vaccination had begun in the UK, the first country to start doing it, using the US developed vaccine, though it was hoped the Oxford one which didn't require such extreme temperatures and was much cheaper to produce and store was hoped to get approval for use by Christmas. So perhaps, by the time I retire we may have resolved the epidemic, though it already feels like it's been going on for most of my life. It's very strange how time seems to distort in unusual circumstances, like we've all been in a collective dream for the best part of a year.

Henry phoned, well, actually, Monica phoned as a dutiful grandparent to see what our little monkeys wanted to put under the Christmas tree - shit, I haven't organised that yet either - and I very politely suggested she ask them herself. So she did. I decided she had more time than I did and so left her to it. Being Monica, with skin about three times the thickness of the average pachyderm, she didn't take offence.

We'd been using Zoom for calls to them from home, so each could see the other and given the limitations of the visuals, Henry seemed to have made quite c good recovery from his latest brush with mortality and I did try to remind him that he had had help from something he should pay attention to. He tried to laugh it off until Stella let him have it from both barrels, and being a very well qualified and senior nurse practitioner, when she mentioned my 'special' assistance and that he'd promised to agree to change both his lifestyle and outlook to allow me to ask for help, he went red enough for it to register on the computer screen and he also began coughing and short of breath.

"So are you saying, that Cathy saved my life using her special powers?" he coughed at her.

"Daddy, you know damn well she did and she had to get help from higher authority to pull you through. Don't you realise you would have died if she hadn't and you made promises to her which you are not keeping."

"If I was that ill, how could I make promises?" He paused to cough and his breathing was laboured. "I can't remember what happened except feeling Cathy was with me, when I knew she couldn't have been." He coughed and wheezed some more when he stopped talking.

"Mummy had to ask the goddess to save you, Gramps," offered Trish, "we just couldn't make enough energy by ourselves, and the goddess did ask for your word that you would change things, 'cause when she talks with the goddess, some of us see it too."

Trish isn't given to lying and Henry knew that, all the same he was struggling both to answer her charge and also to get enough oxygen to breathe. Even after Monica brought him an oxygen mask, he looked to be struggling. I tried to stay out of the discussion. But thought he'd had enough encounters with my healing to realise that it wasn't something I did by myself and that I didn't just plug into the blue energy to zap whoever I felt like, he knew it didn't work like that.

"I'll have to go, folks," he called and closed down the meeting.

"Stupid, obstinate fool," hissed Stella as she walked away from the dining room where the computer was. "If he dies it'll be his own fault." I shrugged back at her sensing she was upset and didn't wish to talk. I'd call her down for a cuppa a bit later.

"Is Gwamps gonna die?" asked Meems of Danielle, who shrugged a response.

"If he don't change, he could," said Trish murdering the laws of grammar.

"Oh, Mummy, don't wet him die," she said sobbing into my arms.

"It's not up to me, sweetheart," I said back to her and hugged her gently. She sobbed for some time with Trish and the younger girls forming a sort of huddle mass around us. Danielle looked a bit sad but left us to it.

"You've got to stop him dying, Mummy," continued Meems and the two littlies were also crying, although I don't know if they understood the concept of death, Meems might as she had actually died once and I'd brought her back and Trish had been close a couple of times.

After about ten minutes Trish took Meems off with her and Hannah followed behind, they were in deep discussion about the limits of my powers - it sounded like they were discussing Superman or Wonder Woman rather than a mere mortal like me.

Livvie followed me out to the kitchen. "Is he going to die?"

"I don't know, sweetheart, I really don't."

"I heard that people who'd been very ill were more susceptible to strokes after recovery, is that true?"

"I don't know, darling, I'm a biologist not a medical doctor, ask Auntie Stella, she may know."

"Well that doctor died a few days after he went home, though he was BAME, I think," she said almost to herself.

"Oh the psychiatrist chap?" I now had some recollection of who she was talking.

"Yes, I think so." I was amazed at what these girls understood either from news bulletins or looking at the paper or perhaps from the internet. I had warned them about what they may see on the net or social media about vaccines and told them categorically, that the evidence for vaccines was in full support but that those who were saying all sorts of stuff against them were mistaken or misled by those who often had some weird idea they promulgated or had a personal problem with the idea of vaccinating against diseases, including such strange ones as vaccines contained something from pigs or made men infertile. They laughed at the pig one, but it was true and would exclude Moslems and Jews if it were true, which it wasn't. But some of these anti-vaxxer groups were seriously mixed up and often believed such things as Covid was spread by the 5G networks. I mean, if someone believed that after being told it was wrong and why, who knows what else they believed.