The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3296 by Angharad Copyright© 2021 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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With Simom present, Danni didn't play up half as much and I wondered why? Is it because she accords him greater authority and is that because he's a man? Does she respect him in a different way to how she thinks about me, because at times she can be very supportive of me and her younger sisters while at others, she can be a real pain in the derriere.

Despite his earlier eyebrow raising act at the cost of a long distance taxi, he agreed it and Danielle, with mild reluctance sighed and accepted it too. She was less pleased when he suggested she should pay something towards it, because she would be earning quite a lot of money for a sixteen year old. After she went off muttering, Simon suggested he would invest the amount she paid into some sort of ISA but she wasn't to know because as long as she thought she was paying something towards it, she'd be more attentive to using it, the taxi that is. He left it to me to organise who we used, but it had to be a female driver, and to bill him monthly for it. I was more than happy with that and I'd massage his ego and possibly something else when we went to bed.

Meems was happy to see her dad and he spent a little while spoiling her. It took me back to when she was our only child and they developed a good relationship then and thankfully, she has never seemed jealous of the others and their demands upon us in terms of time or attention. Trish who was number two in the enrolling programme of fostering, can be very demanding, as can Danielle, the others are less so, possibly because they haven't yet achieved teenagerdom and the problems of adolescence that we were experiencing with Danni. It's all part of growing up and they are subject to their hormones and other things, but it ain't fun for the parents.

I also wondered how things would compare between the t-girls and the natural ones and whether things would be the same given that the former have regular hormone levels whereas in bio-females hormone levels fluctuate depending upon a number of factors including age and size. Periods tend to happen sooner in heavier girls.

If I can stay aloof from the squabbles of teens then I might be able to draw some conclusions but I didn't, for one minute, expect them to be more than casual observations. We'd helped Livvie cope with periods and she and Trish didn't seem that different, except in intelligence, Trish was light years above everyone except Sammi, though Livvie had far greater social awareness and was at times quicker thinking that Trish who sometimes over analysed a situation and while she was thinking about things, Livvie had acted and moved on. Both were very clever young women and they kept us all on our toes.

I never did discover why Danni was looking for her passport and could only think it was for proof of identity for something but quite what I didn't know. I asked Si to monitor her bank account - I know, not exactly legal, but I remembered the time she gave all that money to her friend to save some unfortunate animals. So I hoped we didn't have some other pull on her or this boy she was apparently dating and who was two years older than her. I hope he wasn't trying to squeeze money out of her.

The letter from Reading FC was just reminding her that she signed a contract and they hoped she would be able to resolve her difficulty in attending for training and playing once the season got underway. I told her she could email or phone them to say it had but that it was going to cost rather a lot of money, so any consideration they could give it, would be appreciated. I expected them to reply that it was our problem and that we should have thought more carefully before signing the contract.

Football clubs, like many commercial sporting companies have lost huge amounts of money and with this new variant of Covid which is unleashing problems all over the world, I hoped that spectators attending football matches wouldn't be acting as super spreaders. Watching a bit of the Euro final on telly, I suspected that it would cause a surge in the numbers amongst those who attended as people were too close together and not many wore masks. I'm afraid I also thought many of them looked less than clever but that may reflect my prejudices rather than their IQs which I doubted were very high.

As for the controversial, 'taking the knee,' I personally feel that's up to each individual to decide, but I certainly approve of the principle of kicking racism out of sport and the imbeciles who sent the monkey emojis to the black footballers are disgusting and should be prosecuted. Such behaviour is criminal and needs to be dealt with, but it shows the downside of social media and the double standards of the companies running it. They should be prosecuted as well and perhaps then they'd police it as they should, fines of a few hundred million from each would be a good start, the money could be used to ensure schoolkids got meals during the holidays, which in the fifth or sixth richest country in the world, is disgraceful. But then, I believe it's just as bad in the first richest country and that Walmart used to employ welfare people to help staff claim benefits because the pay was so low. The rich get richer and the poor get shafted, and that has certainly happened during lockdown.

On Wednesday I watched a live screening of a film about the state of the rivers in the UK, where almost all of them fail surveys for cleanliness and safety for bathing. George Monbiot, who writes in the Guardian was one of the brains behind it and it certainly showed how rivers had dropped in standards in the past ten years and that the government, who were going to clean them all up, have welched on the deal and put off any sort of deadline to resolve it. The water companies and farmers have run amok and very few if any have been prosecuted, possibly because they fund the party in government, but I can't prove it.

Amazingly, Monbiot, whose opponents see as an anarchist activist, was asking the government and its agencies to simply uphold the law and prosecute the offenders who release raw sewage or farm waste into water courses because they are ripping the rest of us off to pass on profits to their shareholders, many of which are overseas. Rivers are the arteries of the world, they need to be kept clean as much of the population of this planet draw their drinking water from them, and surely everyone should have the right to access clean drinking water? I don't always agree with George, but this time he was spot on.

School finished last weekend for the girls at St Claire's, so I have to try and keep them occupied and supervised. Danni normally would help to keep them in line but she's smitten with this kid with the motorbike and spends any time she's not with him moping about the house, irritating older and younger inhabitants alike.

Okay, so I should have thought about this before I took them all on or accepted the chair of Biological Sciences and I did to some extent. I have employed various people to supervise the girls but after a few days, Trish intimidates them and they resign. I have again organised an unemployed maths teacher to supervise them and to include some schoolwork as well as games and fun. She lost her job when her baby was born and then sadly died from some rare defect in his heart before it was diagnosed. She was understandably distressed and felt unable to return to work and eventually, the school decided to let her go. Sister Maria knew her from a previous job she had and recommended her. I interviewed her at the university, so none of the girls had any idea what I was up to, and she came over as very suitable and in need of a financial boost. I agreed to pay her over the usual costs but told her I expected something extra from her and I warned her about our brainbox. That she, Jodie Mann, had a first-class honour in pure mathematics, meant that she should be able to cope with Trish's mind games and also set her some testing maths problems to keep her occupied. Trish is so competitive that she won't see that as spoiling her holiday, she'll love it.

After the first couple of days, Trish is very happy but all the others are grumbling a bit, however, I got the hotel to allow Jodie to take them all to the pool there once a week, so sometimes who you know is a definite advantage. So far she hasn't drowned any of them, but ever since Mima's accident, the hotel provides two lifeguards/pool attendants when we are there. I only have to hint at Henry's name and I get exactly what I want. It makes me sound awful and very selfish, but I'm trying to keep a university faculty afloat and functioning as well as retaining some very good teaching staff who would be snapped up immediately if they hinted that they wanted a move. Geology and palaeontology are becoming very popular because they've been in the news on several occasions for work on dinosaurs and pterosaurs. In that area, we punch much above our weight and I've made it known, I want to keep it that way.

I admit I enjoy finding the odd fossil when near pebble or rocky beaches, Lyme Regis, is a super place for that as is Charmouth, both are sites of special scientific interest and hammers shouldn't be used on any in situ fossils. But my experience is that you don't need to try to create cliff falls to get one, just keep your eyes open and walk up and down the beach. I've found ammonites that way and I know others who had belemnites and gryphaea, a sort of bivalve, while the belemnites were like small squid type creatures which leave behind a pointed cylindrical fossil, like a sharpened pencil. There are also fossils of nautiloids, which are like ammonites but have more defined chambers in their shells and have a few species still extant, whereas ammonites are extinct, the ultimate price a species pays for not adapting to changing conditions. It may apply to us in increasing numbers and one of the ways it could happen is to do with global heating and increased humidity.

Once the air humidity gets to 100%, it won't accept any more moisture and temperatures of above 35C can trigger it, which means sweating no longer cools us and we become hotter and hotter. Eventually, heat exhaustion happens and we die. Given the recent record-breaking temperatures in North America recently, even the ex-president should be able to appreciate that climate change is happening and we have contributed to it. The very recent flash floods in Germany and Belgium are also linked to climate change through increased severe weather events, which are predicted in many climate models. Unfortunately, they are predicted in principle rather than actuality and the result is over a hundred people being drowned with hundreds more missing who may never be found.

Climate change is a fact, while the causes are more controversial including how much humans are to blame. Seeing how much we have already damaged the planet in every other way, including turning the Amazon into a carbon emitter rather than carbon sink, shows what humans can do when they really try much of which has been instigated and condoned by the current president in Brazil and the previous incumbent of that large white building in Washington DC.

To cheer everyone up, I had a meeting with a young woman just over the border in Dorset who has inherited an estate and plans on making it much more eco-friendly in the way she manages it. As it includes a village, she has some work to do in bringing some of the locals onboard, but I came away from the meeting feeling slightly more hopeful for the future of this country and perhaps our species. Now, all we need is a thousand like her. Perhaps I could persuade Simon to buy one, oh we have one up in Scotland, but we already do many of the things she aspired to, so I hoped my advice will help her.