The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3077 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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Thank goodness it was Saturday, I was absolutely knackered when I went to bed on the Friday night. I’d spent some of the day in the office and the afternoon shopping for Christmas presents, I was determined that I wouldn’t buy everything on line although it looked like I’d have to for one or two things.

Something I’d learned about our favourite online sell everything supplier was how small the margins of profit they have, so to keep things turning over they have to sell loads. I’d certainly added to their profits over the years as well as most of the major supermarkets and some minor ones too.

According to the people who create the carbon footprint calculators, the more money you have the more you spend which adds to the amount of carbon you add to the environment by CO2 emissions. But then you also cause more emissions if you live alone. Because I have oodles of dosh and oodles of family living here my carbon footprint isn’t as big as it might be: which is a pleasant surprise or possibly shows the weaknesses in such schemes, though it does make me more aware of my emissions and I try not to waste electricity by switching off lights that aren’t necessary and so on.

I’d given Di, my secretary, the afternoon off on the Friday as well because she had loads of shopping to do. The place was crazy, it always is before Christmas, the streets filled with people who are even more moronic than usual. They walk out in front of cars or bicycles because they’re more concerned with what they’re doing than anyone else and if you are on your phone, talking or texting and try to cross the road while someone else is moving a couple of tons of steel in your direction, any meeting is likely to be to your detriment. It might even be the last thing you do, quite literally.

I actually pulled a woman back off the road as a car bore down upon her and all she did was give me a mouthful of abuse because she messed up her text. A passer-by told her in no uncertain terms that she was an ingrate and deserved to be a dead one. She got a mouthful as well, so we both told her to carry on but not to expect either of us at her funeral except to dance on her grave. Smart phones are probably the worst thing we ever invented as they have brains bigger than their owners and therefore the owners should only be allowed to use them when they’re at home, in which case a computer would probably be more useful. The majority of people aren’t stupid, they’re simply not clever enough to make that grade.

I struggled out from bed wishing that someone else could get the girls their breakfasts—they should be old enough to do their own and the little ones as well. But not this morning. I made them wait by washing and dressing before I went down, being so tired I didn’t even notice that the previously sleeping, Simon, wasn’t in bed as I dressed. So I was somewhat taken aback to discover he was downstairs leading the cats choir who burst into Happy Birthday as I entered the kitchen. I’d forgotten.

They made me sit down and presented me with a cup of tea. Trish made me some banana on toast for my breakfast and then while I was eating it, the little ones kept prodding me with cards they’d written themselves.

How could anyone forget their own birthday, unless they were cast adrift in the Pacific or stuck in orbit around Mars with no computer systems working? I’d be stuck in traffic getting to and from Southampton. I’d gone there partly because every time I go anywhere near Gun Wharf, they find another bomb and have to evacuate the entire place. Portsmouth being the naval HQ got quite badly bombed during the Second World War and they’re still finding unexploded ordnance while they dredge the harbour to be deep enough to accept the new carriers they’re building. They’ll be the biggest warships ever built in Europe, only the US navy has anything bigger. But they could have parked them at Portland without need to dredge, except they sold Portland off to the private sector.

At the moment, the big worry is Russia which is causing all sorts of trouble everywhere it can, probably because it’s bankrupt of money and ideas for dealing with the west. They have one carrier which is apparently a load of rubbish but their aircraft aren’t and they also claim to have a ballistic missile that could reach England in ten minutes or less. That’s half the warning we’re used to. The rest of Europe, except France, are not nuclear powers and their standing armies aren’t very big either. How they’d work together against a large enemy, doesn’t bear thinking about, especially after Brexit happens because Britain is the largest European military power and we’ve downsized quite a bit, sometimes, I think, too far.

Back to my birthday. I glanced up at the calendar and saw it was marked and alongside it a meeting at ten o’clock. Danielle remarked upon it and I had to escape the birthday breakfast to remind myself what and where it was. It was the mammal group and it should have been at Southampton the week before but they’d had to reschedule and that was my birthday—oh joy. I remembered Danielle had taken the call because I was out and she put it on the calendar and did tell me, I’d just forgotten—too many things to remember and too few active brain cells.

I’d have to go. It was only eight yet so I had half an hour before I needed to get myself ready for that. However, the time flew by and I had to rush upstairs and change into something a bit tidier for the meeting. Actually, you have to wear decent clothes or really scruffy ones and say you’d been doing a survey before you arrived. In the past, I have done just that, carried out a survey before the meeting.

Today, I changed into decent clothes and asking Si to find my minutes file, I set off late to go to my meeting. If half an hour arguments about public liability insurance is your bag, you’d have enjoyed the morning. Mine, it isn’t and I wondered how much longer I’d stay on the committee, though I know they enjoy having an academic on it, especially a professor who has also got a title—and who says class is dead?

Okay some of the topics were interesting, important too, for the conservation of mammals in Hampshire, especially southern Hants, which is where I am mostly although we do have the woodland reserve and visitor centre which is further north in the county and increasingly important due to the records it’s producing now we have reasonable monitoring under Dan’s management. Okay, I’m nominally in overall charge, but he’s doing a good job on a day to day basis.

At lunchtime it drew to a close, probably due to fatigue and hunger—though there were chocolate biscuits with coffee, I didn’t feel like more than one of them and was glad to escape back home.