The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2947 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 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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The Sunday morning weather had me wanting to get out on my bike, preferably by myself. However, going downstairs in my cycling shoes alerted Danielle to my intentions and she raced downstairs in her pyjamas to ask if she could come too. I could hardly say no, could I? So I told her to go and dress quickly while I boiled the kettle and made us some toast.

Breakfast over, we went to the workshop to collect our trusty steeds only to find they both had soft tyres. The track pump made short work of those and ten minutes later we were trundling down the drive and out onto the road. I hadn’t cycled for weeks, in fact I hadn’t done much exercise at all, so I knew this ride was going to hurt. Danielle hadn’t done much riding recently either but her fitness was much greater than mine, so I half expected her to trounce me on the hills. I really should have gone up onto the downs but instead we rode out past Southsea round Langstone out to Hayling Island and obviously back.

The wind was brisk along the coast and at times a little challenging, especially with my fitness levels. Danielle tucked in behind me and seemed content to ride along at my pace. At one point, the wind veered round behind us and I upped the pace to a racing twenty but she stuck with me and even passed me when my energy nosedived a little after the effort.

We managed to find a cafe open and I had a latté coffee and she had cuppa and a sticky bun. Then after a visit to the ladies we set off for home and arrived back there at ten o’clock with Simon muttering about having had to organise breakfast for everyone. Seeing as even Cate gets her own breakfast most days, I ignored his grumbles and went up to shower. I felt like telling him that they were his children too, but I suspect it would just run off his banker’s back.

I know that generally, he’s quite supportive of me and the children but he does seem to think it’s a mother’s job to feed her offspring, not the father’s. He’s supposed to provide for them and he does a super job at it, he’s just not very good at looking after them, perhaps because there are too many and he likes just one or two around him. If he takes them out in his car, they come back with tales of ice cream sundaes or milk shakes. So he spoils them rotten. This time he got Julie and Phoebe to organise them, so he was complaining about nothing and as I said earlier, it didn’t affect him that much. Coming out of the bedroom after showering I bumped into Danielle who gave me a hug.

“What was Daddy complaining about? He didn’t do anything anyway, Julie did it all.”

“I think he was miffed because I got up and went out without him knowing and didn’t ask him to supervise the children.”

“God, if that’s all he ever has to complain about he’ll lead a charmed life, bloody men,” she said rolling her eyes. I had to stifle a chortle it just felt so funny, especially when I considered a couple of years ago her status was very different but she seems to have firmly embraced her new gender and looks really female now. I gave her a little hug and we descended the stairs together. “Thanks for the ride, Mum, it was really good.” I smiled my response.

Having spent some time with her, I felt I had to do something with the others, so spent an hour in the orchard with Trish and Livvy bug hunting for a project they have to do for school. I have some bug pots, these are plastic pots a couple of inches in diameter and about the same in depth with a magnifying lid, so you can see what you’ve got more clearly. As we weren’t killing specimens, my identification with the odd photo was probably enough for their project, though we only managed about fifteen different species—it was nice in the sun but the breeze was cool. Most of the things we caught were spiders—wolf spiders mainly, but I took a couple of photos of butterflies in the garden as well—peacock and with difficulty, a male orange tip who was rather flighty as soon as I got anywhere near. I solved the problem by getting my proper camera, a SLR with a telephoto lens and took a picture from a few yards away, which blew up nicely on the computer and could be identified clearly.

Part of the orchard is a bit damp, a bit of a spring oozes out there, runs into the pond and then the overflow goes down a drain. Near the damp part we have cuckoo flower which is one of the foodplants, Cardamine pratensis. Sometimes if you look really carefully you can find little yellow blobs about a millimetre or two long which are the eggs of the orange tip. Under a lens they resemble little yellow Ali Baba type baskets a characteristic of several of the White or Pierid butterflies, of which the Orange tip is a member.

A male orange tip butterfly Anthocharis cardamines. (Photo by of Quartl courtesy of Wikipedia)

Orange tips remind me that we’re well into spring but sadly their season is quite short as adults, a bit like cuckoos, which seem increasingly absent from Southern England, though apparently are doing all right in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Researchers have discovered that they use a different migration route from their southern cousins which must be safer for some reason—possibly either crossing the Sahara or those delightful people in the south of Europe who like to slaughter them alongside other song birds for the fun of shooting things. Despite Chris Packham’s attempts to persuade the people of Malta to vote against this annual slaughter a year or two ago, the Maltese voted by the slimmest of margins to continue killing songbirds—there were also stories of corruption influencing the vote or the count but these things always happen in referenda—just look at the recent Scottish vote on independence, which as a Scot by birth, embarrassed me or the accusations afterwards did. The Nationalists will never give up until they get the result they want being ideologically driven rather than concerned about the people of Scotland. But then I accept my own distaste for nationalism is because I associate it with the swing towards the right which also tends to bode badly for minority groups—just look at the situation in the US with the so called ‘bathroom laws’, which is led by primarily very rightwing conservatives, often very narrow minded puritans.

I’m not suggesting that the Scottish Nationalists are in quite the same category of intolerance, because they seem quite tolerant of minorities, so are a different kettle of fish, but I do believe that we are better off as a United Kingdom than smaller, kingdoms which would endanger our credibility abroad. Scotland has a population of about five million, and Wales about three million compared to over fifty million in England, so should the question arise again, surely we should all have a say in it because it could potentially affect us all.

Thankfully, our pottering in the orchard, where the trees are starting to blossom didn’t involve the politics I mentioned above, so we had no grumbles from the girls and a few useable photographs.