The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1969 by Angharad Copyright © 2013 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

I eventually settled on a list that gave him clean socks and underpants for each day, with two pairs of trousers, four shirts, two sweaters and two pairs of shoes. In addition he could take his warm anorak thing and the small thin one which he can roll into a ball and fit in his pocket. He had his rucksack to take as well, and I reminded him to charge his camera battery and his phone before he went.

For his toiletries I suggested we get a small travel tube of toothpaste and some shampoo, which could double as shower gel, and he should take some deodorant and a few sticking plasters in case he cut himself–sort of running repairs thing.

He’d watched the DVD we got him and he had a book from the library on the battlefields of the First World War. I remember flicking through it and couldn’t believe the carnage, although the Normandy landings in WW2 were pretty bloody as well.

I still found it an indictment of our species that we still fought wars and felt the asteroid couldn’t hit us fast enough. Maybe I was just tired and cynical, or perhaps just cynical. We fought wars because of religion or resources; I include politics in religion because religion is all about power over individuals but in the name of their god, which has to be blasphemy in anyone’s book–except it doesn’t count unless anyone else does it.

I cannot understand any of it except as a seeming need in some humans, a significant number of whom also seem to need to convert everyone else to their thinking or persecute those who refuse. I can’t believe the number of people who’ve died through religion, and if you include Catholics in Africa who died because some moron in a white dress told them it’s a sin to use condoms, so they didn’t and either caught or passed on HIV. Now that has to be a sin if not a crime by anyone’s reckoning.

Danny brought me in a cup of tea and I showed him the list I’d drawn up and did he agree. He suggested one pair of trousers and two shirts would be enough. I disagreed, though why did I worry what his friends thought of him, I wouldn’t be sitting next to him on the coach. But I did worry, I wanted people to know his mother cares for him, that he’d be going with ironed shirts and trousers and that I did want him to look neat and tidy for his trip.

He dashed off to put his camera on charge and thanked me for the new card I gave him. I half expected to hear he’d taken hundreds of photos which a year or two down the line he’d forget why he took them and delete them.

We all do that with holiday snaps, this was–wherever, where we did wotsit and met up with wossername. A year or two later is probably as far as most of us can recall for names and places. I have dozens of photos of dormice I can’t use because I can’t remember where it was. I do use them in a generic sense but that’s no excuse, I’m supposed to be a scientist–yeah supposed to be.

I found him a little notebook to use which I’d bought for bird watching but I do so little these days that I’d probably never use it. It had its own pencil inside and I included a little sharpener and a rubber(eraser to ‘Mericans) so he should be fine for recording all his pictures.

I checked his passport and that was fine for several years. I also put a hundred Euros in an envelope he wouldn’t get until he was about to leave. Simon had got them ages ago when the pound was relatively strong, so they were cheap by today’s comparison.

Thankfully they weren’t flying but going on the ferry with their coach, so they weren’t as restricted by weight, however they had been told they would be allowed once case and to take a bag like rucksack as their cabin luggage. He was really looking forward to going and kept on about it. The girls were actively avoiding him because he’d just quote statistics at them about things they didn’t wish to know. He was becoming a battlefield bore and I asked Si to have a word. If I did, he would think the girls had whined to me–they had but I’d also experienced it at first hand.

I glanced at myself in the mirror, was I an ecology bore? I wasn’t a transgender one because I didn’t talk much about it these days unless it came up in some other way, an issue which concerned the girls or me–but that hadn’t happened for a while, thankfully.

I know that one of the things which we can be guilty of is when someone shows an interest by wanting to talk to us or try to understand where we’re coming from, because let’s face it, it’s outside most people’s sphere of reference, we can bore them to death. It’s as if years of not being able to talk about it are liberated in a moment and all that pent up energy flows in an unstoppable tide drowning the listener. Or will if we’re not careful. I hope my kids have natural childhoods so that such things are irrelevant to them. Some hope.

I walked through to the kitchen, David was busy cooking. I made myself more tea and also a cup for him. He turned round as I poured his tea and I handed it to him. He had a cup which bore the title, Head Chef & Bottle Washer, Ingrid got it for him and he wouldn’t use any other cup.

It’s funny to outsiders how sentimental we get about personal items given to us by people we’re very fond of. I remember that shirt that Simon left behind and how I nearly sniffed it to death. It meant so much to me that he left it for me, so I’d have something of him when we were apart. I loved him then, a position which hasn’t changed and which I doubt ever will, as long as I live. I hope he feels the same–I think he does.

I recalled when we had a row and I cleared some stuff from my wardrobe to use up my anger and he thought I was leaving him. He was distraught, as I would be if I thought he was leaving me. Why was I getting so maudlin? Oh yes, Danny is going to be away–one of mine is temporarily fleeing the nest–I hope he’ll be okay. I’ve told him to call every day to say he’s okay and I put extra credit on his phone to make sure it’s okay for him to do so.

“You seem very preoccupied,” observed David.

“Oh–yeah, I was just thinking about Danny going away.”

“The battlefields thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Do him good, to see where all the fighting happened–will help his history lessons come alive.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“It’s what you do with your ecology lectures, isn’t it?”

“What–take ’em to battlefields?”

“No, you take them round woodlands, make the subject come alive.”

“Er–who told you that?”

“One of my cousins was talking about some woman called Cathy who did a course near Bristol last summer–she brought the subject alive–she hoped you’d be doing another one this year.”

“I doubt it, I’ve got a conference to run.”

“Pity, I’ll tell her, she’ll be so disappointed.”

“Yeah, sorry, can’t be in two places at once.” I nodded and left the kitchen, all I needed now was another guilt trip.