The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2651 by Angharad Copyright© 2015 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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I went to sleep thinking about ladybirds, Simon was already sleeping and doing the soundtrack for a Saturn V rocket launch. A sharp poke to his ribs caused him to turn over onto his side and the launch was cancelled.

Friday came too quickly, if the usual happens the weekend will be here and gone again before I can gather the few wits I have left. A series of meetings, some tweaks to the prospectus for next year to include proposed research areas and that now included a section on introduced or alien species. ET it wasn’t, but grey squirrels or harlequin ladybirds it could be.

I’ve always enjoyed looking at invertebrates, as a school kid I used to set traps in the leaf litter and detritus near the compost heap. Basically, it was a jam jar with a funnel inside it. Things blundered over the open funnel and fell into the bits of moss and screwed up pieces of paper. I’d check it morning and evening and with a free standing lens I found in a stamp collecting shop, I’d try and separate into carnivorous and non carnivorous the bugs and other critters that fell into my trap.

It was amazing what turned up there apart from woodlice, who trundle about like robots, it had springtails and beetles, worms and spiders, mites and things like pseudoscorpions as well as ubiquitous ants. I’m sure if ever man lands on Mars, the planet not the confectionery, he’ll discover ants got there millions of years earlier.

Having the luxury of a microscope at home, which most other kids didn’t have, I used to spend hours looking at samples of water taken from the bird bath, the water butts and roof gutters. It was fascinating seeing the microscopic animalcules which inhabited these environs, some of which in summer might afford only a fleeting opportunity for life as a shower filled the gutters with water only for it to dry out into its more usual arid milieu. Most are under a millimetre long and barely visible to the naked eye.

A bdelloid rotifer. (Bob Blaylock Wikipedia UK)

I’ve never lost the wonder of looking through microscopes or telescopes at other worlds which are parallel to our own but need entirely different climates and to which access is limited by distance or size. These things go on day in day out until we or nature disturb them I even saved enough to buy a camera mount and took some very useful if dark slides which I used to do talks with. Because many of them had never seen anything closer at hand than an aphid caught when sniffing roses.

As he could see the potential for education in me having a microscope, my dad helped me buy one. It wasn’t an expensive Beck like we had in the school laboratories, but it taught me a fair bit about using microscopes and making slides. I mentioned before my prowess at slide making which got me some good grades at Sussex and the particular lecturer there, Dr Butterworth, always addressed me as Miss Watts, not helped by my then slightly flowery writing.

At three o’clock I said goodbye to Delia and went off to collect the girls from school. It was half term next week, so I had some time booked off. The first priority was to make sure Danielle had everything ready for the trip tomorrow. Trish was coming with us, the others being less interested though Simon was hoping to be free to come to the match.

Danni was so excited she couldn’t settle and I told her later on to calm down or she would be a total wreck tomorrow and it could spoil her debut game. Mind you, I was also rather twitchy through my concern for her.

It was early on Saturday that we got ourselves breakfasted and ready. Danni had made a checklist and had run through it twice except she’d forgotten her football boots—fortunately, Trish hadn’t and appeared with them asking if Danni had forgotten anything?

The trip up wasn’t too bad and we dropped Danielle off at about eleven, then went off to check our tickets before popping into town for an hour or two and to grab an early lunch. We made do with sandwiches from Marks and Spencer, I had salmon and Trish opted for chicken. They had tuna, but I felt like salmon for a change.

Back at the stadium—these places are huge—we found our seats and settled down for an hour and a half’s wait before the kick off. Simon had sent a text to say he was on his way and would get to us as soon as he could. It was unlikely to be a sell out, women’s soccer is nowhere near as popular as men’s, but there was a respectable sized crowd building up and we were entertained, if that was the right word, by a competition for top majorettes.

Both Trish and I can be quite girly at times but we neither fancied strutting about in short sparkly dresses with gazoos or batons. I thought it had died out and the next craze underway, but obviously not. Most of the crowd seemed to ignore what was happening on the pitch, until a Scottish marching band arrived and then there was a lot of noise. The Scots, or should I rephrase that? Those supporting Scotland were gathered by the one goal, England supporters were all over the place and there were sizeable gaps in the seating.

Simon arrived about ten minutes before the kick off but managed to find us in the stand. The crowd had grown a little but it was still only half filling, if that, the stadium and once again I felt sorry for the athletes who were performing to a much smaller group of fans than they deserved.

The teams arrived, Scotland in their traditional blue and England in an all white strip. As soon as we saw Danni, we shouted and waved though it was unlikely she’d hear us. We all sang the national anthem, God save the Queen, though there were one or two dissenters who whistled and yelled. Unfortunately, such events seem to attract them in sufficient numbers to make a nuisance of themselves, I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who suggested patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. I suspect, I would agree.

Simon had managed to get a programme and I desperately wanted to see what they’d written about Danni. It was very short, ‘Danielle has exploded onto the stage with astonishing spot kicking and fearless attacking play, though she remains a team player who also ran interference and gave winning passes for others to score. Is this the schoolgirl version of a young David Beckham?’

We all approved of the write-up, then I had an awful headache as I began skimming through the Scotland team. I realised the cause of it when I saw the full back Jane ‘Dutch’ Holland. It wasn’t Holland as in the Netherlands who caused Danni trouble but this nasty piece of work. I hoped my dream was wrong and that I was maligning the woman player for no reason, I suppose time will tell, but just in case I began drawing down the light as the Scots kicked off and my daughter got a first senior cap for England.