The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 2004 by Angharad Copyright © 2013 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

The weekend had passed and Stella was to have the use of a Vauxhall Corsa, a GM made car–do they have genetically modified cars in the US or genitally modified as Trish once called it. It was to be delivered on Monday, so when I got up on Monday, Si and Sam had gone to work and Stella was standing round peering through the kitchen window instead of helping feed the bus loads of starving infants we had queuing behind her.

I did manage to sort my lot out and because Phoebe used the moped thing, I somehow got Danny as well as the three mouseketeers in the car and out to school. This was his first day back after his ordeal and I begged him not to get involved in any fights if anyone said anything negative about him, Peter or even Billie.

“Mum, if they say anything nasty about Billie I’ll bust their mouths.”

“Where will that get you?”

“No one bad mouths my sister–no one.”

I appreciated his feelings but tried to explain him lashing out would do nothing to help anything. It’s hard to put an older head on young, testosterone driven shoulders. I gave him some money for his lunches, kissed him and watched him enter the school. He had his phone with him and I told him to phone and I’d come and get him if things got too bad.

He didn’t phone, mind you Stella’s car didn’t happen either. I collected the girls who sat squabbling in the car while we waited for Danny to exit school. He wasn’t expecting us and walked straight past the car, until Trish poked her head out the window and called him back.

He claimed things were okay so I accepted what he said, then had to listen to the squabble all the way home from the back of the car. Someone had taken someone else’s perfume stick–girls!

In the end I was glad to get them to bed before I sat down to watch the hour of red herring spawning they call, Broadchurch; a whodunit which stars David Tennant as the copper investigating the murder of a young teenage boy whose body is found on the beach. The beach just happens to belong to the Chesil Beach, which is a bit to the west of us in darkest Dorset. I happen to know that bit of the world quite well, and watching David T is always satisfying even if I’m waiting for the Tardis to appear at any moment.

I watched the penultimate programme no nearer solving the mystery and suspecting everyone in the town even if they had an alibi. If nothing else they’m all guilty o’ murd’rin’ a Darzit accent.

Having watched it I was about to suggest to the snoozing Simon that we went up to bed when the news came on and I was astonished to hear they’d had a bombing at the Boston Marathon. My blood ran cold but I suspected it wasn’t the usual suspects it was too clumsy.

I nudged Simon who took a few moments to come round and then he like me, watched it with a sense of disgust and disappointment–it was such a futile thing to do and achieved nothing except pain and grief of people who probably had nothing to do with whatever the bombers were upset about. However, that wouldn’t stop the bombers seeing them as legitimate targets. Wonderful the human brain–it can justify anything it wants to however unreasonable that may be to everyone else. I’m tempted to say just think of religion but then we go round in circles–although the majority of outrages seem to be justified on the grounds of politics or religion, with just occasionally–the voices made me do it.

We went to bed tired and saddened by the news report, and when they mentioned the Thatcher funeral and the London Marathon later in the week, it made everything seem even more futile than usual. However, the people organising the security for both events seemed to think everything was in hand–and they had just carried out a successful Olympiad, so they are probably correct.

I had the feeling that it the marathon bombing was carried out by local lunatics but I couldn’t say why or who. All I knew was that the FBI would be involved in a huge investigation where money would be no object, especially if they caught the perps.

On the Tuesday, I felt tears in my eyes when I discovered one of the victims was an eight year old who’d gone to watch his daddy run. How can some lunatic with a bomb justify killing that child? They couldn’t and I felt a mixture of sadness and anger. Then I heard some young woman of twenty three had killed her three babies and jumped off a multi-storey garage to her own death after a squabble with her boyfriend. The world was getting more absurd by the hour. I was tempted to go outside and check I was in the right house or perhaps that should have been, the right planet.

After taking the kids to school, I came home to discover Bramble had caught her first mouse and that Kiki had helped her kill it. The bad news was the mouse was the radio mouse from my computer which lay in bits covered in dog spit. I called the local computer chap who had a spare one which he’d keep for me and I’d collect on the way to get the girls.

There was no point in berating the dog or cat, the former doesn’t seem to understand she’s doing wrong when caught red pawed, and the second is simply a psychopath like most cats who don’t do wrong and who are simply mystified by the stupidity of humans to not understand their need to do as they wish at all times.

I almost apologised to the cat for not buying a mouse which was more easily killed, while thinking about designing one which delivered electric shocks when she tried to do so. Instead I sprayed oil of citronella around my desk–it might reduce her desire to go there–well it stopped her weeing under the stairs.

After lunch, the promised Corsa arrived and Stella was much taken by the light blue metallic paint and even more so by the young chap who delivered it, so much so she was still pleading ignorant of how to change gear on the windscreen wipers so necessitating further tuition from the delivery man. I left her to it when I went to collect my mouse and then the trio of nun-catchers.

Having collected my replacement piece of hardware, I drove to the school wondering if it was worse to be Trish trying to hold herself back when she considered the nuns were lying about things they clearly didn’t understand and she did, or being a nun facing an unbridled intellect from someone so young. As a teacher I can think of nothing worse than being told I was wrong then losing the subsequent argument because the child quotes chapter and verse the reasons for her case and its evidence. I should think anyone trying to explain the Creation to her must be heartily sick of quotations from Professor Brian Cox, the particle physicist at Manchester University, and who Trish dotes on even more than I do on Dawkins.