The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2482 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

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All souls, or all hallows is the day following Halloween, or Hallow’s eve had it not been corrupted over the centuries. It’s another Christianised pagan festival—like most of them—which the Irish called Samhain (pronounced Sow-wain). The reason for all the nonsense about ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, relates to ancient Celtic beliefs that the worlds of the living and the dead were separated by some form of barrier that became thinner or more permeable at certain times, this being the Celtic new year or end of the old one, the ancestors were easier to contact to ask for advice and so on.

Much of the pagan stuff spouted these days is as nonsensical as the Christian stuff and although they purport to have all sorts of traditions, certainly much of both are more modern than they let on. Also you can guarantee that at least one vicar somewhere will take a fundamentalist line on people celebrating Halloween. This year some moron in a dog collar in Weymouth declared that the ‘creatures’ children dress up as, ‘were more evil than the Nazis.’ He obviously didn’t do modern history in school.

As a non-believer, I find it ludicrous that people can declare one set of imaginary beings good and the other wicked or evil. Seems like the bogie man is alive and well and living in some people’s fantasies. Obviously, at great risk to all our mortal souls, we allowed the children to dress up and play games and generally enjoy themselves, and far as I know we all survived, although there were some rather damp monsters after the apple ducking. That’s a nonsense too. It’s almost impossible to bite an apple because floating in water doesn’t allow you to put downward pressure on the fruit, and most apples are too big to take into your mouth—or should be for ducking. It’s fun but futile.

Most of the dangers in this world come from physical agents not metaphysical ones. Things like other people, dangerous animals, geophysical things like earthquakes, poisons or infections, all involve physical agents. Even radiation is better understood and shown to involve invisible—to the naked eye—particles which can seriously damage us such as cosmic rays or radium, but we can’t see them. It’s perhaps ironic that Marie Curie died from the effects of radiation from pitchblende a mixture of uranium compounds, which no one realised were dangerous at the time, and these same things or variations of, are used in the treatment of cancers, which over exposure can also cause.

Women going for mammography are informed that one in fourteen thousand who attend for them may go on to develop breast cancers from the X-rays of the mammograms. I hope when my turn comes there weren’t thirteen thousand, nine hundred and...in front of me. Knowing how gullible I am, Stella told me if I wanted to get a feeling of what a mammogram felt like, to take my top off and my bra and shut my boob in filing cabinet while pushing it firmly closed. You may be surprised to hear I declined. Fortunately, I have a few years to go before I get called up for breast screening if it’s still going on then. Some authorities declare the whole programme is a waste of money and resources. So it might be scrapped by then.

As different sorts of imaging are being developed all the time, which don’t damage the object being scanned, it will be interesting how future technology will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren. Things we take for granted nowadays were unknown to our great grandparents or pure science fiction. Like space exploration in the nineteen forties and fifties was almost science fiction but in nineteen sixty nine NASA managed to put a man on the moon and get him home safely. The technology was relatively primitive by today’s standards, Second World War rocket science and primitive computers. It’s said that the average family car has more computing power than Nasa did in nineteen sixty nine, so what they could have done with my iPad is nobody’s business. They still make mistakes when a few years ago they landed something on Mars only to realise some people were working in metric and some were using Imperial. Humans make mistakes. Sometimes with catastrophic results. It will be interesting to see what the outcome of the Virgin space travel machine that crashed yesterday, killing at least one of its crew. I doubt it was hubris, but a few people might consider than running flights to the edge of space for entertainment might be verging (or should that be virgin?) on arrogance. Considering how much junk is in space, I hope this isn’t going to add to it or pollution of the atmosphere. How people can afford the cost is another factor, though I’d love to see earthrise from behind the moon. Only a few people have done so and it must be magical.

Jacquie handed me Lizzie to feed. She’d obviously drunk the two bottles I filled the other day. My milk is less constant now because I don’t feed her as often so I suspect one day soon it will dry up. I’ll miss it, the feeding, but in some ways it will be more convenient as my time seems more and more occupied by work.

I’m not entirely convinced that my status as a professor means I’ll have a larger audience to convince of global climate change and the need to examine farming practice and urban sprawl with a regard to protecting habitats. If temperatures continue to rise as predicted we could lose quite a few species and acquire some more, including insects that carry diseases like blue tongue in sheep and dengue fever. Could malaria become a problem again, it was several centuries ago when they called it ague?

The only constant in life is change and judging by the smell of madam’s nappy, change is due there as well. “C’mon you little monkey, let’s get you comfortable and smelling a bit sweeter,” I said as I took her off to bath and change her as she cooed and chuckled at me and the faces I was pulling at her. “Ma ma ma,” she said and smiled showing me the two teeth that were chewing lumps out of my nipples.

“You little monkey,” I said to her and she chuckled again. I wondered what state the world would be in when she was thirty, it would certainly be different.