The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1890 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

Surviving Trish’s little joke, we arrived back at home and I sent the girls up to change and start their homework. I’d always had homework as a child, or prep as they sometimes called it elsewhere. Now I had some of my own to do–to decide what we did about the infected trees. It was a real dilemma; did I leave them to die off altogether and possibly spread the disease to other non-infected trees or cut them down? Oh boy.

I waited until after dinner and spoke with Tom about it, but he had no more idea than I did. The advice of the forestry chap had been to fell them, but I really wasn’t sure. Dead trees provide homes for all sorts of bugs and also places where woodpeckers live and drum. One of my favourite sounds of spring and early summer are buzzing of insects, birdsong and the drumming of woodpeckers on dead trees. Their holes–that sounds vaguely obscene–the holes excavated by woodpeckers are sometimes used by other species, including nuthatch and little owls. I hadn’t seen many little owls despite the fact they often fly during daylight, but then I had very little time to go bird-watching these days.

I made myself a cuppa and went off to my study and began doing a critical path analysis–a load of jargon for columns of for and against. Even that that didn’t help because everything seemed to balance itself, the position was no clearer. The government advice was to fell and burn the trees, but then that advice caused the unnecessary slaughter of millions of animals because of a foot and mouth scare. Unnecessary because the disease doesn’t kill the infected animals, though it does cause them to lose condition and thus value. It also causes positives in tests post slaughter, although I’d have thought that could be dealt with. Governments seem to see solutions with sledgehammers preferable to toffee hammer ones. I prefer the latter. Seems like I’m destined to be at odds with Whitehall for the future.

I checked with various websites including Natural England, and it seemed the advice was to fell the trees. Perhaps I should just go and hug a few of them and see if I could heal them? I laughed at my own silliness, then frowned when I realised my tea had gone cold.

Simon and Sammi arrived. She was in slightly lower heels than I’d last seen her in and she admitted she’d bought some new shoes with less height in the heel. I agreed she’d done the right thing. She was getting continuous pain from wearing the heels and that was easier with the lower ones. I shrugged and hoped she’d draw her own conclusions, though being a rather young woman with so little experience, I wasn’t sure what she’d decide.

“Can I have a play on your new computer after dinner, Mummy?” asked Trish, and Livvie wanted to come and play too. I wondered what they were up to–probably no good.

“Not tonight, I have things to do on it.”

Simon gave me a funny look but shook his head instead of saying anything. I asked him as a management problem how would he deal with the dilemma I had about the trees. “Cut the lot down, sell the timber and retire to the Caribbean.”

“It’s a nature reserve, not a commercial forestry area–remember you lot bought it?”

“Of course we did, I wonder if Dad used his credit card–if so we could ask for a refund.”

“From whom?”

“The credit card company.”

“I thought that was you?”

“It is.”

“Can you sue yourself?”

“I probably could, but not many others could.”

“That figures, Si.”

“That’s right, turn to insult when you can’t think of a cogent argument.”

“I have better things to do with my life, Simon, than worry about High St Bank plc versus High St Bank plc. Whatever happens, the bank will win.”

“That’s the only good thing about it.”

Now it was time for me to shake my head and return to my ivory tower. This wasn’t fair. I was dealing with real situations, not hypotheticals, I’m an academic, not a manager–I’m supposed to eschew the real world for one of what if scenarios which I’m supposed to explore with tutorial groups of intelligent students, and between us we’re supposed to come up with a solution no one had thought of before since Homo sapiens had invented sliced bread and the bicycle.

Given my usual experience of brainstorming or setting up work groups with students, I’d be just as well asking my own children or a group of dormice–their answers would likely be as useful.

What we needed was something like a virus or micro-fungus which parasitized the ash-dieback fungus. Sadly that could take years to develop, and I need to decide what I’m doing with these trees in the next month or two. I knew that systemic antifungals didn’t work, and cost a great deal of money. It needed either some sort of biological answer or some way of increasing the speed of evolution to produce immune specimens–which might require all sorts of clever dick laboratory tricks, possibly genetic engineering. Whatever the answer it’s going to take years, and we’ll have lost enormous quantities of trees of one of the most useful of species. I mean what will Morgan cars do–they use ash for making their chassis?

In the end I decided to clear the infected trees from an area of the wood and remove the timber in covered lorries and bring it to a barn here, where we’d chop it up and dry it, then burn it on the fire here or in the wood-burner in my study. You didn’t remember me having one there did you? Probably this was because I haven’t, but by the time the wood is dry enough to burn, I will have. The lorries will be disinfected after use, so minimal dispersion of the fungus will have been possible.

Once the trees have been removed we’ll wait for a year or two and replant, and see if the saplings become infected. If they do, we’ve got problems. I tried to decide where to run my experiment, based upon a survey done on the woodland some ten years before, giving approximate density of tree species. Thankfully, the major climax was oak, which tends to tower over ash, as does beech, so ash is seen as sub-climax, except in one part of the wood where it was possibly the dominant species.

I’d have to check it out with a forester and report back to the university–even though I was director, the university were the management board, and I’d have to get their approval to carry it out.

Life doesn’t seem to get any easier as I head towards my thirties and at times I wonder what I’m doing wrong or is it like this for everyone?