The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3476 by Angharad Copyright© 2024/2025 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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A few months has passed since I chronicled my life and times here, the major one has got to be the Supreme Court ruling which effectively makes all transwomen and men non people, and we can't use single sex spaces or participate at sports in our new genders. It's a particularly stupid ruling in which the judges refused to take personal or expert advice and opinions into account. It means I no longer have any respect for the highest court in the land which appears populated by numpties.

The effect on me is so far minimal, I ignore it and continue with my life as I always did, the effects on the others is much greater. Danni has had to leave Bournemouth ladies football team, which distressed her and also the team, which have lost their best player. She has lost a good income over that I actually discussed with Jason, my lawyer, suing the Supreme Court for her loss of income through no fault of her own. Jason told me it would be a waste of time as they will only accept points of law. I then wanted to go on a publicity rampage showing how stupid the court was and also the women who brought the action. This because most of the media was anti-trans as was the government. This persecution by rightwing politicians has been imported from the US, Farage has announced he is anti-trans so Reform has become the new NAZI party. Why us? I don't know except we are small in numbers and unable to fight back against these bullies. It is something we can't help, it has a probable physiological basis from the womb, anything else seems accepted, if you have some congenital condition or the colour of your skin but not if you are gender dysphoric. It appears persecution of the latter is acceptable as long as you lie about it or exaggerate it, because the people of this country are so stupid they'll believe anything including accusations from lying bastards like Trump and Farage. I'll move on to other things now.

Trish has gone off to Europe, to the ESA, the first we knew about it was Sammi went to stay with her in Cambridge and she wasn't there. Her housemates told Sammi she gone to the Netherlands, to Noorwijk in particular. I sent her an email once I found out telling her off, but she ignored it. Danni sent her a text and she ignored that too, mind you that was rather rude, direct I think you call it.

We discussed it as a family and decided that we would no longer pay her an allowance and Henry would consider taking her name off the house lease in Cambridge. He'd decided that he would still rent it to the girls who were using it but once they gave up, he'd either sell it or rent it out at competitive rates ( about twice the rent he was charging).

Simon was borderline type two diabetic and only now was he considering a look at his diet, he seems unable to take this on board as it's a potential killer and can lead to all sorts of things from blindness, kidney problems, loss of limbs and death. When I speak to him about it he puts his fingers in his ears and says 'la la', rather loudly.

Apart from Danni, who is able to learn from experience, although she was very distressed over having to stop the football, she decided to retaliate against the court ruling by finishing her master's degree and going on to do a PhD. She was going to become a household name as a biologist, just like her mum. I really admired her inner strength and courage, it is a growing sign of her maturity. She is beautiful and much cleverer than we originally thought. She mentioned possibly going to Oxbridge to do her doctorate and Henry told her if she went to Cambridge, he'd hold on to the house there that she could use. She thanked him and assured him she wouldn't do a Trish.

The rest of the girls were going on as normal, if there is such a thing. Meems was back to her usual mobility, though she had worked hard for it. She was back at Southampton but looking for another job, lecturing at a university on history. She had lost confidence in Southampton who were always looking to make cuts, but that was a fact of life these days, we were all having to do it and it was rumoured many unis were either merging or going bust. I told her to write a book and become well known as an expert on women's history looking at famous women through the ages, like Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette or Emma Hamilton, Nelson's partner. She never says much but I noticed she was researching such women, so she may have decided to think about it.

Hannah has passed her A-levels and was going to Exeter to do law. Livvie had done this a year or two before and was doing a masters in commercial law, several law firms were courting her and while she'll earn a good salary once she's established, they'll make her work for it. Their parsimony was well known. Cate and Lizzie were in middle school, so still costing us school fees.

Stella and her two are all fine and she is looking at running the GUM clinic mainly on her own, she has experience and is well regarded by the surgical lead, a man who knows several of us intimately. Simon is much the same, clueless and like a schoolboy in many things, but he does regard me as someone special. When the ruling happened he wrote a critical letter to the court saying that as he had been happily married to a transwoman for several years, did this suggest he was now homosexual as they regarded his legal wife as a male, in which case he was taking legal advice and looking to sue. They wrote back saying it did not suggest he was gay, he thanked them and told them their ruling was simplistic, ignorant of the distress it would cause to many, unscientific and completely stupid. He wrote a similar letter to the prime minister but received nothing other than an acknowledgement.

You may remember I had a little local difficulty with a secret intelligence service. That went on for some time and it took a request from Henry to sort out, he spoke to the Home Secretary at a banquet and she said she'd look into it. I had another anonymous phone call telling me that my request for action on county lines gangs was now being cancelled on the authority of top line management. That's all they said but fatalities amongst all sorts of people seemed to cease afterwards. It seemed that the drug gangs were so depleted that they stopped trying to attack us. I read various articles suggesting that thirty people had died who were involved with them but the probability was closer to fifty, including some rather important names, who it was alleged might have been the bosses. I got the impression that being important gained you no protection from MI6.

Now as for the university, nothing had really changed, Daddy was still vice chancellor, Diane was still running my department, while I did as I was told. It was agreed I would do some teaching on the aquatic invertebrates element and we would be offering a master's degree with a bursary which I had managed to shame from the local water company, to look at the effects of pollution by sewage in our rivers and streams. I was rather pleased with myself for that one, next time I'd go for them providing a research grant for a PhD researcher.

We were still officially on holiday, at least the uni was, but were working hard behind the scenes trying to sort out all those who had applied to us and who had met the criteria in their A-levels, and then those who had just missed it. They had shown my documentary on harvest mice again on the BBC and were deluged by young women wanting to study them or dormice. I had replied to a letter in the i newspaper about the release of pine martens being a threat to dormice, saying it was minimal seeing as climate change, agriculture and loss of habitat, including corridors linking habitats were much more of a danger. I don't think they've published it yet maybe they won't, newspapers sometimes don't publish the views of experts, even ones as lovely as me - well so Diane tells me.

Do you remember me offering a maternity cover post to Delia, my previous secretary who had shown great interest and had got herself a degree in ecology and also a master's degree. Well she accepted my offer and took to it like a duck to orange sauce, one of David's aphorisms. He's still making us all too fat by concocting such a wonderful menu. He's refused no request for a meal even when he doesn't usually cook it, so Thai items and Chinese are regularly part of the family's diet, if not mine. I try them but usually don't like spicy food, but Tom gets his favourite curry occasionally. Apparently, it's not unheard for a nice bottle of wine to find itself on his cottage doorstep, though of course no one knows anything about it, but the coincidence of it happening the day after he made Tom one of his curries, provokes comments amongst us of professorial grade and humour among the post-grad student grades.

In all things aren't too bad except Danni's loss of her football interest and that ruling, Diane actually wrote complaining about it to her MP, who replied with a suitably anodyne reply. I'm really fond of her, as a secretary or personal assistant she is brilliant and takes loads of things off my desk that she can do instead, so saving me a great deal of work. We let her spend a week at Stanebury castle this summer as it was too hot on Menorca. She loved it and also the staff, she loved them too and they told me she was no bother and they love to see her again. They obviously don't know her that well do they? She's catching up on her workload from her holiday at the moment so Mandy is keeping me supplied with tea. I told them professors need so many mugs of the stuff in order to function and have these amazingly wonderful thoughts. Mandy believed it for at least five seconds before looking directly at me and rolling her eyes. well, I tried to bring the magic of university to her little mind and she doubted me. Ha, how dare she?