The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2471 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

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The alarm had gone off and John Humphrys was saying something meaningless when something flew into the room and bounced onto the bed, on me to be precise and with the accuracy of a laser guided bomb, landed directly above my bladder. Before I could grab it, it had shot off to create mayhem elsewhere. I had to scramble off to the loo thinking, I’m going to strangle that bloody cat.

As I showered I wondered how it could strike with such pin point accuracy, surely cats didn’t have any understanding of human anatomy beyond the bits it uses, like laps or hands to feed or stroke it. Perhaps we underestimated our feline friends, which according to one zoologist I heard recently, dogs were fully domesticated but cats still retained a sense of the wild in them. In the case of Bramble, I suspect she’s more a case of the wild with a speck of domestication in her.

By the time I’d dressed and woken the others, our wild child was sitting by her empty dish, for a dumb animal the implication was obvious, she wanted her breakfast and she wanted it now. Not so dumb if you ask me. I got her food out and gave her some in her dish. The children arrived as Tom came in with Kiki, “I fed yer cat afore we went oot,” he said and I’m sure that little monster winked at me before she rubbed herself against my legs and went off to seek and destroy whatever mission control decided were targets today. Just think air strikes in Iraq, only if cats were running them, the terrorists would have been bombed into oblivion weeks ago. Cats don’t take prisoners. I refuse to call them Isis, that’s the name of the ancient Egyptian goddess who married Osiris, as well as a tributary of the River Thames in Oxfordshire, and I believe the name of one of the university’s racing boats.

“Where’s my gym kit, Mummy?” Trish called and broke my reverie.

“Where it usually is.” I knew this because I’d put it there the night before last when I’d finished ironing it.

“Oh no it isn’t,” she replied. I had visions of a pantomime sketch developing if I wasn’t careful.

“Well it was,” I brushed past her and up the stairs to her bedroom. “What’s this, Scotch mist?”

“It wasn’t here a minute ago.” She blushed and took it from me blushing as she did. “Sorry.”

“Look more carefully in future,” I said then heard giggles from downstairs. One of the others had probably hidden it then put it back before they came down. Some days they were like a clan of monkeys, not convent girls. Having said that, listening to stories of previous convent girls, half of them were like devils and the other half were worse; and they were better than the nuns whose only sexual thrill had come from helping with the inquisition. Perhaps Murray wasn’t as bad as I thought—right. He was worse, he was some sort of homophobic pervert who I’m sure got off on mistreating boys and me in particular. Couldn’t he see that I couldn’t help being girly, I was a freaking girl? If any of that happened to my girls I start the loudest legal action to have the offender removed ever heard in a court of law.

“Mummy?” I felt someone pulling at my arm.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Can you ask David to get more icecream?”

“I’ll ask him to check.”

“Thanks, Mummy.” Livvie went to collect her bag and minutes later I was loading kids and baggage into my car, remembering when my feet didn’t reach the pedals that Si had driven it last night. Half an hour after that I was walking into my office with Delia following me carrying an armful of paper and reciting a list of meetings I had that day. I felt like fleeing back to my bed and pulling the duvet over my head. Another day at the office had commenced and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do this every day for the rest of my life. Quite what I wanted to do, I wasn’t sure, but bicycles and dormice, I hoped would feature large in it.

“D’you like working here?” I asked Delia as she carefully placed a cup of tea on my desk.

“Yes, Professor, is there a reason why you ask?” As a temp, I suppose she does have reasons to be anxious.

“I hate it.”

“I hope that’s not something I’ve done.”

“No, Delia, if anything you make it almost tolerable.” She quietly sighed and relaxed. “I came into teaching by chance, they needed someone to do revision and I’d just got my MSc, which meant I could teach. I enjoyed it almost as much as I did fieldwork, then I moved up the foodchain, and here I am, a glorified business manager.”

“You seem quite good at it.”

“Teaching is what I’m good at.”

“I heard your courses were always oversubscribed.”

“Yeah, we did get a bit busy for a while. Seemed that every adolescent female who watched my dormouse film considered they could do it better than I did.”

“I heard the opposite, Professor; I heard they all wanted to be you.” I sipped my tea rather than replying. If they’d known about me, they certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be me, would they? Even the compensation of a wealthy husband wouldn’t really make them want that, would it? Perhaps it would seeing as they all aspire to be rich and famous without doing much to earn it. If they were most of them would be unhappy when they couldn’t go down the shop for a loaf of bread without some paparazzo taking their picture with their hair a mess and no makeup on.

I read things even in the Guardian about nonentities who seem to think they’re celebrities because they were last to be voted off Big Brother or some equally banal reality TV programme. Now there’s a misnomer, ‘Reality TV,’ which is about as real as Mickey Mouse. And what about ‘The Apprentice’? If I understand it correctly a group of egocentric psychopathic liars are set tasks by a megalomaniac psychopath just so he can fire them for being morons. They’re all morons in the beginning, they have to be to get involved with sacrificial television, which destroys people for the entertainment of its viewers. Like the Roman amphitheatres, slaughter for titillation of the crowd.

As for the public confession shows where young couples wash their dirty linen in public to receive opprobrium from both the presenter and audience, it seems no depth is too deep to plumb. Why do people watch them? Maybe my job isn’t so bad after all, my idea of hell is being locked in a cinema showing endless reality shows, with no escape or off button. I shuddered.

“Are you all right, Professor?” asked Delia who I’d forgotten was still there.