The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3390 by Angharad Copyright© 2023 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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I shall never forget Wossisname I mused chuckling at my own silliness. His name was on the tip of my tongue but not apparently in my mind wherever that seemed to have gone. I'm not forty yet so it must be very early onset dementia. Were I serious this would be concerning but I have found that things that are not in the everyday language of the individual seem to be forgotten as if the mind keeps a gazetteer of the things which it uses regularly and demotes things that aren't used so frequently to a second type of memory and that is harder to access, in my case practically impossible when I want it but very easy when I don't.

I tried to think of things unrelated such as coming by taxi as my chariot was in for a service. I've only done local mileage for the last few weeks and had to wait for the 12 000 miles to happen, or should I say multiples of 12 000 because the car had actually done 48 000. Seeing as it must be six years old, that is less than the average and possibly because the weather was nice and dry and Trish, Danni and I had been cycling to the university for a couple of weeks. I had left a couple of tidier outfits in my office so I could change there and deal with various things like meetings or teaching.

Actually, there were very few students around the place except post-grads who were researching various subjects; in fact, I was waiting for one now, hence my reverie about the person whose name I had temporarily mislaid in my memory.

The next hour was so tedious that I nearly lost the will, not to live but to stay awake. I had drawn the short straw in ending up supervising Christopher Machin. His project looked quite good on paper as a proposal, but the reality became mired in miscellany of an irrelevant nature. He was researching some nesting peregrines on a church tower and comparing them with another pair nesting on a quarry cliff face near Southampton.

I had got him permission to do the study from Natural England and a grant to buy the camera and transmitter he had at each site, which took an image every time the parents landed with food items, which were then recorded, which meant we could see which species of prey items were most numerous at each site and what were common or different between the two. Hardly rocket science but possibly very useful for future planning for the conservation of protected species.

He arrived late and flustered, why I didn't know, as I'd completed a dozen or more letters for Diane to send out after taking a taxi in from my little chap who does my car servicing, together with Trish and Danni, neither of whom seemed to be in a desperate hurry to come in. Trish was helping a post-grad student with his research into lasers or something, and Danni was doing some microscopy of various different muscle types. She had been doing it for a couple of days and said that she came across several slides that she thought I had made as a master's student some years before. She said she recognised my tiny girly handwriting as the same as I have on a slide collection at home. There are about a thousand altogether as I was making slides of all sorts of things while I was at Sussex. I was supposed to be making them for the university's slide library, but I took advantage of making some for me of the same rather unusual subjects, things like rare insects or coelacanths.

Remember, I was a biology undergraduate, who just happened to be good at making microscope slides of biological subjects. I was at it for several weeks and nearly got nicknamed 'Microtome Minnie,' because I had a whole raft of equipment that I was using and therefore loth to let anyone else 'borrow'. Some of it was mine and most of the expensive stuff belonged to the university, like the electric microtome which was used for cutting specimens so thin, about 1 000th of an inch, that light would pass through them, the various cells being highlighted with different stains.

It's quite detailed work and apart from various poisonous dyes, delicate subjects have to be embedded in wax or in things like a carrot to be able to be able to slice them with the blade and then required to be cleaned up by soaking them in solutions to dissolve the wax or other supporting structure so that you have just the subject of the slide and then you have to glue it to the glass slide and pop a coverslip on top to protect it and not have any bubbles in it. It takes ages to do when you're making lots of them and trying to hide the collection that the university is unofficially funding for you as well.

That sounds like gross dishonest; it wasn't, it was all part of the slippage or breakages that occurred and I always took the second-best slide, for my collection. With the insect slides we often had to dissect out the genitalia of certain flies or wasps. They were that difficult to identify; we had occasionally to request the help of an entomologist who was doing post-grad research in the lab next door. The price of his knowledge was an occasional slide for his collection but this was a fair trade.

It was while I was engrossed in this occupation that lots of my contemporaries and some of the teaching staff regarded me as a girl, although those who consulted the registers at the time would have seen my name as Charles Watts. However, they all called me Charlie of Charley depending on how they interpreted the scruffy urchin I presented as. My clothes were always clean, disguising my increasingly female body shape as my androgen insensitivity influenced my growing body. That most male undergrads seemed allergic to soap and water or washing powder, unless living at home, made me something of an oddity.

Dr Butterworth, who headed the Microbiology Unit, always regarded me as a young woman, quite why I don't know. Possibly he addressed me as female once and as I didn't correct him as most men would, he assumed that I must be a woman. I hadn't heard him because I had an MP3 player plugged into my ear playing Beethoven symphonies, which my long hair hid, another thing which made my appearance androgynous, to say the least, not helped by my women's cargo pants which fitted my narrow waist and burgeoning hips and bum.

Because the testosterone that was secreted by my body was largely ignored by my metabolism, my muscle structure was also undeveloped, and looked much more like a prepubescent girl than a scrawny boy. Why my parents didn't seem to see it, especially as I only went home occasionally, so they wouldn't have been that used to it, but they didn't. I suspect my mother did but turned a blind eye and my father had been told by the midwife when I was born that I was a boy, so that's how he saw me until I forced him to see me as a woman after I has met Stella and she had encouraged my transition.

Anyway, Phil Collins, no, not the Genesis drummer, but a technician at Sussex and with whom I was doing the slide project, asked me out. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I thought he knew I was a boy and I knew he wasn't gay, so why would he ask me out and it wasn't done as a mate?

I used to wash and iron my clothes at least once a week, so they did look tidier than many of my contemporaries. I did it because I wasn't sure if anything had spilt on them from my laboratory work, although we wore lab coats, and I didn't want to either stain my trousers or damage my legs. I was wearing panties at this stage, at least most of the time, which he may have noticed. I certainly did not wear bum floss, as thongs were called, because I didn't like the feel of straps sliding in between my buttocks, so VPL was always possible.

We had been at slide manufacture from about eleven o'clock that morning and we'd made something like a hundred or two, my back was aching and I hadn't had any lunch so the prospect of a burger and a glass of lager was inviting. Well, Phil was even worse at holding his liquor than I was, or he was perhaps doing shots as well as the lager we were sipping, but he got paralytic and while weaving about on wobbly legs came on to me. I resisted him as well as I could and walked him out to his car, whereupon he fell asleep in the backseat. I couldn't very well leave him in a pub car park as I regarded him a workmate, so I drove him home parked outside his flat, and covered him with a blanket before locking him in his car. On older models of cars, it was possible to lock the door by pushing down the button on the side of the door whilst holding in the external button of the lock and slamming the door closed. I left the keys in the ignition and locked him inside the car.

Because I'd found the blanket in the boot he thought we had done something that we hadn't; besides he was too drunk to do anything, but the next day he kept winking at me and giving me knowing looks all the time we were in the lab together. I overheard him telling one of the other techs that 'I was a bit of a goer and a good lay' and always meant to put things right, but after I left Sussex and got seriously into my ecology and dormice, I heard he had got a form of leukaemia and died. I was sorry that he had contracted such an awful disease because he was a nice chap and a very good technician and I never did get around to correcting his mistaken belief that he had bedded me. Only Simon can claim that fact and if men as sexually magnetic as Des Lane had been, had failed to get his leg over with me, then I don't think that poor old Phil had a prayer.

My microscopy collection grew and at one point I nearly became an entomologist but once I'd been smitten by the allure of dormice, I was lost to the world of insects except as a passing interest. It's almost impossible to be either a biologist or an ecologist without having some contact with the most numerous form of arthropod on the planet which are important to the biodiversity of the planet by dint of pollination or pestilence; swarms of locusts continue to cause food production problems in places like Africa as do Anopheles mosquitoes with spreading malaria, one of the biggest causes of death in the tropics.

At one point I nearly got selected to go to Africa and research mosquitoes but my dad wouldn't pay for my board as he said I hadn't proved to him that I was serious about the project and should let someone else go in my place. I withdrew with embarrassment but it enabled me to get the dormouse 'bug' and to study them instead, for which I am eternally grateful, although I never did get to Africa, I suppose I could afford to go there for a holiday if I really craved it. So far chasing Muscardinus around this country is satisfying enough.

Gosh, you lot will soon know more about me than I do, at least Simon seems happy that I haven't been playing crime fighter for a while although just what the war in Ukraine is going to do is very worrying especially as the invading country is one which excels in double standards, that has now seemingly blown up a dam near Kherson. That such carnage should arise from the delusions of one man or a small group of them, completely baffles me, but he is an ace at propaganda and lots of his own people are being sacrificed for his madness. If Ukraine eventually wins, perhaps they will learn but I am not holding my breath.