The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3397 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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On Monday, I was sitting in my office, actually, I was lounging trying to think of the wording I needed to write a begging letter to a local company. I wasn't after money this time but the chance for a student to get some work experience. The company was an ecological-based one that ran all sorts of surveys. We did some but they weren't as frequent as commercial firms, for instance, they might do an emerging bat survey in the evening, then the next morning at dawn or earlier, do a return to the roost. I'm talking of bats here, which are important to council ecologists and may need all sorts of surveys and licences to get planning permission. Then as soon as they finish the bat stuff they might be surveying for lizards or mammals, lunch if they have time, and looking at vegetation required to fulfil demands from the council or certainly to complete a Metric 3 form, required for planning permission to alter somewhere or build something.

Building in the countryside should be well regulated. In theory, it is but we still hear reports of landowners doing their own thing irrespective of the law. Just look at waterways and rivers which are so polluted by sewage or runoff of animal excrement, that the potassium levels are so high they are smothered either in water plants or algae, some of which may be toxic. Every year there are reports of people whose labrador had just been poisoned and dying because it had drunk water from a pond or lake which contained poisonous algae or the toxins from it. If the stupid owners looked before they let their dog swim in the stuff or drink the water, it might have saved their much-loved pet.

We have been contracted to do some river and stream investigations next term where we will analyse the water chemistry, survey the vegetation, take soil samples and also survey for aquatic insects or lack of them, usually Plecoptera (stoneflies) and some caddis flies, Trichoptera, which are known to require clean water. It looks like I may be leading the aquatic insect thing myself as the person who ran it for us before has left and gone to Imperial College, London. I gave them a good reference and was quite happy to see them go, let London deal with their carping and moaning. The new term will see me mugging up on all the stuff I knew when I was twelve and an active pond dipper. I think I still have the notebooks somewhere that I kept at the time; okay they were a bit lacking compared to what my undergrads will be keeping but seeing as I was a twelve-year-old girl, and using a couple of books for identifying my catch, compared to the library I have now and of course the use of the internet. Mobile phones also mean they can download various apps, many of them free to identify their catches and we offer some training by the FBA or Freshwater Biological Society, who really know their stuff.

I say twelve-year-old girl because I believe I was always female, and walking to my ponds and streams wearing the dungarees my dad got me, which were girls, and my longish hair under my baseball cap and Siân's old wellies, (mine had a leak), they were yellow with butterflies on them, I must have resembled the epitome of masculinity, I don't think. Fortunately, Dad had usually gone to work before I did my pond sampling.

I carried my kit in an old shopper of my mum's, which was a blue paisley thing but it held all my stuff except my net and wading pole - an adapted broom handle with a loop of cord on the top of it and which I'd written depth markers in biro from the bottom, so I knew the depth of water before I waded into it and perhaps the depth of the mud in some parts. I lived on the outskirts of Bristol, so in my teens, there were still one or two farms and ponds about, plus I had permission to sample from a nearby National Trust property which had an ornamental lake in its grounds. In return I had to send them a list of species that I caught there, which meant I had to up my game somewhat, perhaps that was the pressure that made me into the scientist I am today.

When I went the first time to the NT lake, I was dressed as usual in dungarees and yellow wellies, with longish hair and a cap, I was met by their head groundsman who was responsible for the upkeep of the estate and pond. He was a very nice middle-aged man, Mr Soames, I think he was and he asked my name, I told him Charlie but I think he misheard me because he called me Carly and I didn't have the nerve to correct him. Meeting him was the first time I had heard of risk assessments (now everything requires one).

He assumed I would be accompanied by an adult and I wasn't. He told me of the depth of the water and laid down a whole load of rules about what I could or couldn't do. He told me that he would be keeping an eye on me and produced a flotation device I had to wear when working near the water. I showed him my kit as suggested by John Clegg, much of which was improvised as was my net. It was an old fine net curtain, no longer wanted by my mum, which she made me sew to do seams and then a fold-over top that enabled me to slide it on an old landing net my dad had for fishing and which he gave to me.

I had an old enamel tray in white, plus some small dishes which I could use to sort my catch and try to keep things like predatory beetle or their larvae from items that they usually hunted, like mayflies. I had a couple of pipettes courtesy of my local pharmacy, a spoon, some tweezers, a hand lens, which I got for my birthday, and finally a sort of weed drag, made of a piece of lead pipe about three inches long into which I had fitted some big bent nails and a strong string, before hammering it flat. Its weight meant it could travel a few yards when I threw it, always remembering to keep a hold on the free end of the cord.

I showed him my Observer's Book of Pond Life and he said I was obviously clued up on what to to, so he let me demonstrate my technique after donning the floatation device and then showing him how I analysed my catch, he told me I was a good girl and he thought I would listen to his instructions unlike a dumb boy, so he left me to it.

I used to go there most of my summer holidays unless I was out with the young ornithologists group, so knew the lake quite well. I was trying to learn some of the adult forms of the insects too and had a few of those detailed in notes as well, especially dragonflies, their archaic design of body really fascinated me, and their bold colours and shiny bodies were most attractive. Once or twice I was there when professional entomologists were recording them and got quite upset that they caught and killed them before identifying them.

I understand why now, but it still makes me shudder when we have to kill things to prove we saw it despite photography being available, there is nothing like a specimen, I suppose. I know lots of aquatic insect larvae and other critters will die when we start doing the waterways survey next term. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too squeamish or sentimental for this job, then I calm myself by believing that any anomalies we find in our results would be reported and also another generation of biologists or ecologists will now understand what we are trying to conserve.

So, I spent quite a bit of time noting or trying to draw some of the things I caught, compiling lists of the insects I caught including the odd loach, a fish, usually the juvenile stage of them, but they were put straight back into the water as my surveys really were about invertebrates and fish spines, I mean backbones, not the stickleback variety, which of course have bones as well. I think all freshwater fish are bony ones, the cartilaginous ones being things like sharks, which of course are marine animals.

The yellow wellies forced my dad to buy me new ones, although, as he wasn't there when I left he didn't know if I wore them or not. I was quite happy to be Carly at the NT property and Charlotte on the young ornithologist's trips, it didn't worry me one bit, whereas an ordinary boy would probably have said something.

My pond dipping period vanished when my dad decided I was old enough to go cycling with him, he newly rediscovered the joys of two wheels and bought himself a new bike and bought me a second-hand one. It was an old girls' bike but it was in reasonable condition with ten or fifteen gears and drop handlebars. It took a while, but I soon became enamoured of cycling and he showed me how to mend a puncture or replace brake blocks and within a year he had bought me a new bike and I was doing most of the repairs. I occasionally went pond dipping but I eventually ended up with me doing a project on dead hedgehogs as I rode around on my bike, complete with notebook. My hair was longer then and it became a point of contention with my father. I refused to get it cut and my duel with Murray was just about to start. We'd had the odd run-in before, including me getting the book for saving that old man, when I was mistaken for a girl by the families involved and a local copper.

Mum had conspired with me to keep it from my dad but I later found out that he saw it in someone else's 'Echo'. He played hell with her for not telling him and she blustered her way through it saying that she didn't think it was important and that making a fuss now would only draw mine and other's attention to it, which of course, he wanted to avoid. So I only learnt from Mum later that he knew about it, he only nearly did something about it when Murray phoned him and expressed his disgust at my effeminate appearance.

Because our riding was just for enjoyment we concentrated on distance rather than speed and just plodded away with the other slow riders in the local CTC. However, once I realised I could hurt his ego by being faster and stronger as a cyclist then I started to develop an attitude towards it. I wasn't as fast as some of the male riders when I started riding with the long rides but I could do the distances and I bought myself some lycra cycle clothes. It made me look skinnier than ever and whenever we did a joint ride with another branch or club, I was told that I was a skinny winny and when was I going to get an arse and some tits? My little willie was almost invisible in cycle shorts whereas some of the men looked like they were part horse or had horse parts in one particular place.

Funnily, my bum did grow a bit and compared to my narrow waist I started to look a bit like a girl. It felt exciting in one respect, but I was worried that someone might tell my dad and I started to wear looser kit.

My riding was still aimed at riding at pleasurable levels but that all changed when I was at Sussex and thought about joining the racing club and they told me to ride with the girls and I took umbrage. I may have liked riding with the girls but no one was going to tell me that I was effectively a fairy. So I used my student loan to buy a new bike and went training every moment I could on the steepest hills to build strength and sprinting in intervals to build stamina. By the time Stella knocked me off my bike a hundred miles and steepish hills had no fears for me. I wasn't that fast but I could ride and ride.

I never did ride for the university as an undergrad but I could have beaten several who did. However, my gender question began to rise again and despite all the exercise I had, my musculature was undefined. I may have had powerful legs but you wouldn't know that by looking at them and I began to get a little worried when the people looking at them, my legs, that is, were all boys who had funny looks in their eyes.

That was when I rode to Portsmouth to hear Professor Agnew, told him what I thought of his ideas, and shared some of my own and he offered me a place to do a master's degree. I had no idea that my previous professor had written to him and told him that I needed some room to sort myself out, but you know about that.