The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1678 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

It was nine o’clock on Easter Monday, the second bank holiday in the UK and the weather was foul with a capital F. It rained and blew, and I had a houseful of bored children and piles of work to do.

Simon, as he'd stated the night before, stayed in bed and my plan to change his mind by invoking the curse of the aliens–didn’t work. Instead the little buggers followed me downstairs demanding food and drink with menaces. Perhaps that should read for rather than with menaces.

I fed the little darlings and asked Julie and Jacquie to keep them occupied while I did a couple or three hours work on my survey. I planned doing an hour of overall admin and then the rest on my rodent control. Sounds like a pest controller, perhaps it is–only the pests are the people who submit reports. Quite what they’re thinking I hate to consider.

I had one from someone who just suggested that rats were everywhere. Fine, they could well be, certainly there’s plenty of them in Westminster, but until we have evidence, we can’t say that the old adage of–nowhere in Britain are you more than ten feet from a rat–is true.

It’s also probably true that house-mice are to be found in all places of human habitation within the United Kingdom. We don’t see them too often unless they’re very numerous, but I’m willing to bet we have some in the outbuildings because things get chewed every so often, and I don’t think it’s rats.

Grey squirrels, Sciurus carolinesis, seem to be spreading despite attempted culls and their native cousins, the red squirrel, Sciurus vulgaris, is continuing to decline. We get grey squiggles in the garden and we have a record of an albino in Southsea from a resident who heard about our survey and wrote to the university–the woman also supplied a photograph–it’s definitely a grey, albeit a white grey, if that doesn’t sound too Irish.

Oh very funny, I don’t think, someone has sent me a copy of the picture of the moose trying to mount a statue of a bison. People do farm the odd bison in this country but we won’t be keeping records of them unless they become feral–and I suspect that is very unlikely, they’re too valuable and too big to hide in a small country like ours. Having said that, I get at least one record a week of people who are convinced they’ve seen a big cat, usually a panther. Any photo they send is usually taken with a compact camera from at least five hundred yards and with no way of calibrating it. I keep them because there has to be a study there for someone one day, the obsession with dangerous wild animals, most of which are as plausible as visits from UFOs.

The strange thing is that the senders are totally sincere or cleverer than I am and are merely taking the urine, but I suspect the vast majority are in the former group. Oh and while we’re on the subject of cryptozoology, I’ve had half a dozen records of sightings of Nessie. It’s unbelievable that anyone except possibly the Scottish Tourist Board and sellers of souvenirs, could have any belief in the existence of Nessie.

I know we regularly turn up things we thought were extinct, including the British black honeybee, which was fairly recently in the news, so things do show up, but some sort of pleisiosaur surviving for a hundred million years after the rest became extinct, is hogwash. Even the famous photo is now known to have been a hoax, which spawned thousands of wasted hours of hopeful Nessie watchers and even some expeditions to search for it.

Thankfully, even if they found it, which has a probability of zero, it wouldn’t involve me except as a skeptic, because they’re reptiles, not mammals. People should be looking for sea otters on Loch Ness, then we could accept records.

“Mummy, I’m sorry to disturb you but Trish and Livvie have been at each other’s throats since breakfast.” Julie usually manages to keep the lid on things but not today.

“Oh, kiddo, while I think of it, I saw Leon yesterday.”

“Oh, where was that?”

“He was with a girl.”

“Oh, I suppose that was inevitable, given my then shortcomings.”

“You’re being very philosophical, I’m really proud of you.”

“Yeah well, it’s not like we’ve kept in touch, since he joined up.”

“I suppose not. I saw him come out of a house down near Fratton Park.”

“Not the drug den?”

“No, a few doors down from that.”

“Oh well, I’m glad he wasn’t into that.”

“Me too. Okay, I’ll come and sort out my two warring daughters.”

The squabble was over a book, which they both claimed to own. I offered to cut it in half and they could each have a bit. Both declined to allow that to happen, although Danny did offer me his penknife to do the deed. Oh well, it worked for Solomon but not for yours truly.

I noticed the time was getting on for mid day. No wonder they were getting fractious, they’re probably feeling hungry. I made a quick pan of soup–peculiarly, it had some lamb stock, and they’ll be getting shepherd’s pie tonight–although there is a law banning the inclusion of real shepherds in the pie. I didn’t know we had any shepherds these days, just farmers who keep sheep.

A while ago I spent half an hour watching a farmer herding(?) sheep with three dogs, splitting them into different flocks and then sending those to different places. Very clever, the dogs knew exactly what to do and had obviously trained the farmer very well.

After lunch, the showers of rain were still as heavy and frequent, but we were so fed up with the four walls that we wrapped ourselves in waterproofs and walked down to see the sea. We would have been cold and wet without the protection afforded by Gortex and assorted other weather-proof clothing.

However the fresh air blew away the cobwebs and we all felt a bit better for the exercise. Even Simon came, complete with his Barbour coat, which he needed. His trousers got quite damp, whereas my drover coat and wellingtons kept me dry as a bone. In fact, I felt perhaps too warm at times, due to being so well lagged and the windproof quality of modern waterproofs.

One of my dormouse team sent me a text to say some animals had apparently woken–it’s very early–so I hope there’s enough for them to eat. It worries me every year that this might happen and I feel the same watching swallows and martins trying to find enough flying insects to feed on. The fact that large numbers of them don’t and perish only adds to my sense of agnosticism and the futility of existence.

When we got home, Julie, who was doing her nails and thus didn’t come with us informed me that James had rung. So he was still alive an hour ago. He was apparently going to phone again.