The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3297 by Angharad Copyright© 2021 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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In my Guardian George Monbiot was again on about rivers and referred to his recent film. I wasn't aware that he had an Oxford degree in zoology, but then seeing as he was on about algae, I'm not sure if would help much. He was talking about algal blooms causing problems on the River Wye, some of which can be of diatoms, one of the regular members of the phytoplankton and which differ from ordinary algae by having a shell or test made up of silica. They can be so numerous that diatomaceous mud or even rocks can build up in lakes or even the sea, which like the organisms that created it, is rich in silica.

I remembered from my undergraduate days doing stuff with diatoms, which have the most exquisite shapes, sometimes requiring phased contrast lighting of the microscope to see them properly. This is a system of altering the way the light enters the microscope so that it highlights certain elements of the subject you are viewing. dark field lighting is another way of seeing them more clearly than with normal lighting.

I had the day off, and seeing as it was so warm, decided I'd take the girls to the beach if they wanted to go. Of course. I made the mistake of asking them before we'd finished breakfast and they got noisier and sillier. I had to bang loudly on the table before they became quiet. Danni asked me where I planned on going to see the sea and I decided on Southsea or Hayling Island, assuming we could get anywhere near them. She said if we were going to Hayling, she'd come as well but not to Southsea. I agreed to her blackmail as she's good at helping to supervise the smaller kids.

David arrived and I asked him to make us some packed lunches and he nodded. I knew we had plenty of rolls as there was a huge pack of them in the pantry, so one of those for everyone and perhaps some crisps and loads of drinks and that would do for grub.

While all the others were donning swimsuits under their top clothes I went and shoved two beach umbrellas into the VW people carrier and a couple of windscreens. Jodie arrived while I was doing this and helped me. She knew what we were doing today and was happy to come and boost her tan. It was going to be another scorcher and I had a bag already packed in the house with first aid and suncream.

We would park at the hotel at Hayling and to make sure we wouldn't be clamped or anything, I had some parking permits they'd emailed me. Then it was a question of checking they all had knickers to wear on the way home and that they took a towel with them. I left Jodie to organise the girls while I packed enough bottles of drink to start a small cafe and food aplenty in another large bag.

Then I had to think exactly who we were taking and count them as I did. Danielle was the oldest, then Trish, Livvie, Hannah, Meems, Cate, and Lizzie, which made seven and would be right as there were eleven to begin and we'd lost Billie and Julie, Phoebe and Sammi no longer lived at home.

We got there at about quarter past ten and already it was pretty hot and the beach was heaving - so much for social distancing. We set up camp when we found a few square metres of sand and I set up the umbrella while Danni did the wind-break and Jodie kept an eye on the smaller girls who were intent on stripping off their top clothes before I got the groundsheet down and open out the three chairs we'd brought - the sofa wouldn't fit into the car. The younger ones could sit on the ground as the chairs were intended for we bigger ones - okay, a bit of dominance in action, but it's acceptable if you call it parenthood.

We finally tidied the place up and while Danielle supervised the youngsters with help from Trish and Livvie, Hannah, Jodie and I ferried the food and drinks from the car to base camp. As soon as we had, the girls all rushed off to the sea leaving Jodie and me a chance to have a drink of tea from the flask - a big one - and a sit down to get our breath back.

I had charged the four larger girls with taking it, in turn. to watch the younger ones and not to get too boisterous with them. Jodie and I chatted and sipped our tea, her in a bikini which she'd stripped down to and me in a bikini top and shorts. I had the bikini bottom on under the shorts but I was happier with the shorts for the moment, though it was very warm. According to my phone, the temperature was 30C, a definitely dangerous temperature if out in it too long.

About half an hour later the girls came back for drinks and we recoated them in sun cream and off they went again. It was like that all morning, them coming and going, Jodie taking a stroll down the beach to have a paddle and possibly be ogled by young men, though compared to Danielle's face and figure, she'd be the second choice, but Danni is something special, especially considering a year or two before she'd been living as a boy and I'd never seen her as anything other than a good looking young man, which perhaps shows how perception changes with circumstance.

I started reading my book about the evolution of eyes and the author's suggestion that life 'exploded' in the Cambrian because animal life could see and be seen. I'm reading it as a sceptic because palaeontologists now believe there was a much greater variety of life in the Precambrian as predicted by Darwin and which makes much greater sense. He even mentioned in his magnum opus, On the Origin of the Species by natural selection, that the lack of earlier fossil evidence undermined his theory and that wasn't discovered until after his death and now they have possible organisms that go back much further than he would have considered to periods that are 3 billion years ago in Europe and possibly older in Australia and Africa. Some of the European ones occur in ancient rocks on the West coast of Scotland, so presumably would also be the same in Newfoundland which was once attached to what is now Scotland. It all happened when the tectonic plates which move the continents around met up as a supercontinent Pangea and then broke apart again.

It sometimes boggles my small brain that we live on a planet that is whizzing through space at thousands of miles an hour, spinning round at about a thousand miles an hour, with the earth beneath our feet moving about through tectonic activity and possibly with the action of organisms like bacteria and earthworms and larger things like tree roots. Things are constantly changing, some of which is rapid like an earthquake or volcano or very subtle and slow like the repositioning of soil by earthworms and other species and their introduction of organic matter into the topsoil which is what enables most of the plants to grow. It's here that much of the biology happens, with the interaction of detritivores and destructivores, breaking things down and enabling plants to absorb nitrogen salts, usually as nitrates, through their roots often with the assistance of fungi. They help each other, the fungi taking sugars from the green plants which have made it by photosynthesis and exchanging them for minerals and salts that they can't access by themselves.

It's been estimated that the soil contains more carbon than the plants growing on it, though some authorities disagree, the soil does contain masses of carbon in the organic layers caused by shed leaves and dead plants which fall there waiting for worms and insects and even smaller assistants such as bacteria to break it all down and recycle it.

So is that the climate problem solved? Not quite, it does help but the action of the bacteria and fungi also release things like methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia, all of which can contribute to increased global heating. But then so do forests in a natural situation as the trees respire at night releasing carbon dioxide just as we do when we burn up energy, the only difference is green plants can replace the oxygen and remove the carbon from the air but we can't.

I contemplated the role of green plants in the general ecology of the planet as I sank my teeth into an egg and cress roll, the cress in question being watercress (Nasturtium officinale) which I love as it's packed with vitamins and minerals, has a slightly bitter taste and apparently has been eaten as a leaf vegetable by humans for millennia. The girls also wolfed it down though I made them wait for an hour after eating before they went swimming again. Instead, they had a sandcastle building competition Trish and Livvie helping Cate and Danni and Hannah helped Lizzie. Jodie was asked to judge the winner and declared it a draw and offered ice creams as prizes for all. I gave Danni twenty pounds and off they went to get their treasure while Jodie and I had a natter.

"It's a pity you don't get more time with them, isn't it?" she said to me.

"I don't know, we're all sane at the moment, not sure if we would be, were I home all the time."

"Oh, come off it, Cathy, you all interact wonderfully. They adore you and you do them."

"The adoration doesn't prevent minor fracas and occasional internecine wars, in which I have to try and act on behalf of the UN. Sometimes the battles are between the girls and me, Danni had a strop last weekend and it took me a while to calm her down."

"Didn't you have issues with your parents at her age, usually a combination of hormones and boys?"

"I certainly had issues, my parents were much stricter than I am, which also gave me some difficulties with self-worth."

"Blimey, you've done well despite them, then."

"I suppose so, not always by design, sometimes it happens by itself presumably having set off a course of action causes other things to occur as well. Some are good others less so, but, yes, I can safely say that I am very lucky and well pleased with my lot, most of the time. I didn't plan on becoming a professor, nor married to a peer nor adopting half the waifs and strays in Hampshire, but I don't regret a single thing of it."

"I wish I could say the same," sighed Jodie.

"I lost my man, my baby and my job all in the space of a year, annus horriblis doesn't begin to describe it."

"Feel free to talk about it if you wish," I said quietly donning my amateur counsellor's hat.

"What good does it do? I suspect it would only change your attitude to me as a total failure or I make you feel sad too."

"Sometimes they describe such a period as an .annus mirabilis."

"What? A year of miracles?" she looked shocked.

"Apparently, it means year of wonders, and was applied to 1666 when they had the plague and great fire of London."

"Is it an ironic term?" she asked obviously never having heard it before.

"I suppose it could be, but I think it related to the opportunity for change to rise up from the ashes, to rebuild the city as it removed the very narrow streets and generally insanitary conditions in which people lived. So things could improve if there was a desire to do so."

"I suppose St Paul's and Trafalgar Square, but didn't people live in total squalor in parts of London during the time of Jack the Ripper."

"They did, but Charles II also created many of the royal parks in London."

"So he could hunt deer?" she snapped.

"Possibly, I'm just trying to say that every negative once dealt with, offers a chance for something positive to happen, even if it's simply learning from a mistake and moving on."

"So how many children have you lost?" she said coldly obviously not convinced by my attempts to lift her attitude.

"Just one, my daughter Billie who died at age ten. She had an aneurysm burst in her brain while we were out cycling, she crashed and broke her neck as well, but the post mortem suggested she was already dead when she crashed."

"I'm sorry, Cathy, I didn't know." She now sounded rather sheepish.

"It's no secret, but I still miss her, she was very close to Danni who was devastated when it happened."

"I'll bet."

"Her grandfather and Simon bought a woodland, turned it into a reserve and built a visitor centre there, It's named after her."

"That sounds lovely." What else could she say as I wiped a tear away just as Danni appeared with two ice creams which she handed to us?

"You owe me five quid," she said and disappeared again. Jodie laughed as I shook my head.

"Teenagers," I sighed.