The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3235 by Angharad Copyright© 2018 Angharad

The weekend gave me a chance to refresh my sanity, although the girls were at times apparently on a mission to prevent it. It all started off with a weird dream. In it, the real reason why farmers were culling badgers had nothing to do with bovine TB but rather the badgers had discovered the real reason for Brexit and were going to tell all to the Guardian. So the government paid farmers loads to silence them. On reflecting on it while I sat on the loo, it made as much sense as the apparent reasons--disaffection and dissatisfaction with the political classes by those who felt they had been neglected. It is possibly the same reason for Trump's success in the States, except that the problems both will cause will affect those who voted for them the most and in a negative way.

On returning to bed, Simon was lying on his back snoring Rule Britannia interspersed with Land of Hope and Glory. I shoved him over as I got into bed and he returned to silent running--isn't that something to do with submarines? Where did that come from?

It was five o'clock and try as I might, I wasn't going to get back to sleep again, so took myself downstairs and made myself a cuppa. It was while I was drinking said reviving fluid that Trish appeared.

That makes it sound like she popped up through the floor or in a flash of light (can you get a flash of anything else--exempting strange men's--ugh--never mind). "Mummy, why are you up so early?"

"I could ask you the same, young lady." If stuck for an answer, ask a question back.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Neither could I."

"Am I going to get anzeimers? They say you get it if you don't sleep enough."

"Alzheimer's disease, you mean?"

"See, I've forgotten its name already, I must have it, Mummy."

The problem was she was genuine, she burst into tears saying the was 'becoming demoted'. What an awful thing for a child to fear. When I was her age, I was so frightened of myself and my gender predicament, I had no time to worry about the long term future, possibly because I thought I didn't have one and that my short and unhappy life would either end in being killed by someone or doing it myself.

I held her to me and quietly reassured her that she was too young to get dementia and by the time she got old, there would probably be a cure for it. I wasn't sure how much I believed it, but as long as she did, it was of no matter. Half an hour later she was sitting on my lap and we both fell asleep in the chair, until the tea sought egress and her weight pressing on my bladder made the situation more urgent.

Leaving her curled up in the chair and fast asleep I trotted off to the loo only to be accosted by Mima as I came out of the convenience. "Whe's Twish? She's not in bed?"

I hushed her and led her through to my study where her sister remained in her dormant state. She sniggered and whispered rather loudly, "She wooks wike a do-mouse."

"Nah, if she was her tail would be up over her nose." It was the wrong thing to say because Mima roared with laughter waking up her sister.

"Wossappening?" she yawned and then jumped upright and ran off to the cloakroom, calling, "Gotta wee," as she went. I don't think it was a war cry, but with Trish, who knows?

The two of them went back to bed leaving me with my thoughts and a total lack of sleepiness. I had some second marking to do of a PhD dissertation so made some more tea and picked up my pencil. The idea was very well written and the arguments it raised answered succinctly. Dave Goulson, he of the bumblebees ( he studies them it's not a pop group) suggests that when you are writing a PhD dissertation, until someone reads it, you possibly know more about its matter subject than anyone else because you have just spend umpteen years studying it and not much else.

It wasn't apparent in this particular dissertation, but Goulson would have enjoyed reading it as it was about the effects of pesticides on bees, especially those of the neonicotinoid variety used as seed dressings in things such as oilseed rape.

It's now quite well known that the poison stays in the plant and even contaminates the pollen and nectar any of its flowers produce and at the same time some washes out to poison the soil and nearby watercourses through the ground water. A little goes a long way, especially in terms of poisoning invertebrates, which in turn are eaten by larger things. It happened with the organochlorines and appears to be the case with neonicotinoids, though of course the farming lobby and those in the pay of the huge agrichemical industries deny it. The EU have just agreed to ban them indefinitely except for use in closed glasshouses, which of course have drains which will distribute the poison quite adequately to maintain a problem, but it appears the EU didn't have the bottle to ban them entirely, which is what is needed, until they invent the next batch of toxic chemicals and heavily market them, bribing governments and some scientists to keep quiet about the harmful effects until they've made as much money as they can.

As with the tobacco industry, the lies will continue even though they know the substances they sell will poison us eventually or cause diseases which would otherwise have been avoidable.

I put down the dissertation promising to look at it again when I was fully awake and decided to go back to bed before anyone else appeared and kept me awake. Having said that, the uniformity of the prose style in dissertations is famous for sending most people to sleep, which might explain why most chairs in libraries, are designed to keep you awake, being hard on the back and the bum.

On entering the bedroom, I discovered two aliens asleep with Simon, who was still dead-oh. I ended up sleeping in Trish's bed until they found me about an hour later. Then I was almost dragged out and breakfast was requested--and that was just Simon.

Later on I asked Trish if she was less worried about her forgetfulness to which she replied, I think without any sense of irony, though with Trish I'm never quite sure, that she had completely forgotten about it. Soon I'd forgotten about it as well as the duties of the matriarch of the family interrupted and I was too busy to think about anything other than the task in hand, including rereading the dissertation.