The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3272 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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Over the next week, I filled in the application for Edinburgh, I wasn't sure if I'd attend for interview or even if I'd post it. Such jobs usually involve several interviews and at the moment, with the current lockdown, interviews would likely be online. I would also have to give a presentation at each one. As I've also spent time making a couple of online films for our students, I was beginning to get the hang of it, especially when Livvie did the filming with our camcorder. She definitely has a flair for photography and I wondered if she may study it when she's older or whether it would remain an interest. Lots of people have creative hobbies, which probably help in offsetting the day job, lots of them are pretty soul-destroying, though I suspect, life is what you make of it be that work or leisure. I used to have the best job in the world, or so I thought, but then motherhood arrived and I discovered that caring for my babies was even more enjoyable than teasing dormice. Okay, not all the time, but mostly and let's face it, even surveying dormice involves as much playing with records on paper or computer as it does fieldwork.

I showed my application to Tom, who made a few suggestions and we discussed what they'd likely want me to do the presentations on. He thought that a teaching session to final year students of the bachelor's degree and perhaps one on helping master's or even doctoral students may be useful, after all, it's for a professorship at a revered university and we all know professors spend half their time bidding for research grants or funding of other sorts to keep their department afloat.

The salary at Edinburgh was only hinted at, but would possibly be less than Portsmouth because here, I'm a super-prof acting almost in a role that merges the professorship with the dean of the faculty. Did I mention as the latter element is continually growing, Diana, who is my Personal Assistant, has someone acting as our secretary, so she provides work as well as me for the young woman to perform. Her name is Alana, but I don't hold it against her as most of us are subject to the whims of our parents regarding our names, though I accept I'm an exception to that rule as are most transsexual people.

I suppose I could have been a Charlotte, as I was called in school by the bullies and wannabe wits, though most of them didn't have the wit to be very amusing or anything else for that matter. Alternatives could be Charlene, though that tends to be more American than British. Charity could have been another, though it may have given a false impression of me, as would Chastity, especially if my surname had been Belt. Having said that, before I transitioned, I did expect my life would continue in its asexual rut until I met up with Kevin the mechanic whose pen is big, and of course, my Simon, who I love to bits.

Before transitioning and thus before I integrated into a more social world, everyone thought I was either gay or weird so I had very little social function except to try and not be noticed by anyone else and maybe they wouldn't spot the increasing feminisation of my body by the oestrogens. It was the same throughout my schooldays, where survival and avoiding the bullies were the priorities, having relationships was something I considered unlikely and although at times I felt frustrated and lonely, I was more frustrated by being the possessor of the wrong sexed body and I believed my relative asocial life was the price I'd have to pay for being myself, an outcast but one with a vagina and breasts. How wrong I was and am I glad to admit it.

I'm still relatively shy and uncomfortable in social situations where I don't know many of the others but I can function much better, mainly through practice and I can role play very well, but it's hiding the real me beneath it, something as transsexuals we learn to do very quickly, survival may depend on it. I sincerely hope that my transgender children will have less trouble than I did because they've mostly been reared as girls and will learn through adolescence how to relate to the opposite sex and how to cope with those they find sexually attractive or those who find them so. I can teach them how to cook or sew and other household tasks but I don't think I'm much of a role model for relationships, mind you neither is Stella or Simon, for that matter. So quite how we get around that, I have no idea but there is comfort in suspecting most parents probably feel very similar.

Livvie and I did another film for an online lesson, though we all knew at the university that we couldn't teach some of the elements of the course without practical sessions, dissections were one along with some of the experiments they have to do to show the presence of proteins and glucose in body fluids. We no longer do the frog's leg jerk when connected to a battery as we can show that using a film in greater detail which also has animations to show what happens in the muscles when they are electrically stimulated. Personally, I find that much more ethical, I don't like killing or hurting things if I can help it, though we still murder Drosophila in the hundreds in genetic experiments but they breed and grow so quickly, they are ideal lab animals and as far as we know do not feel pain like more sophisticated animals, like rats and mice. Some of the rats they have in another of the laboratories are even older than my dormice, but generally the larger the animal the longer it lives, probably because all life involves questions of scale and wear and tear on organs and systems and perhaps equally important, is the fact that larger creatures take longer to grow and develop independence. This less true in the reptiles and the birds which developed from them, but is certainly true of many mammals.

I read an interesting report recently which suggested that sharks have some element of social interaction beyond mating and eating each other. They apparently recognise each other if they are from the same group, the groups may be mixed species but from the same geographical area. The researchers considered that sharks that moved from their group to another to mate or hunt acted slightly differently than they did when with their homegroup.

Something which has been in the news recently is that some researchers believe they have solved one of the most curious phenomena in mammalian biology and that is, how do wombats produce cubed shaped faeces or in the trade square shit? When it was first noticed, a very long time ago, it was suggested they had square anuses or even that they patted their poo into cubes (why was never disclosed). Now it's been discovered that it's to do with having strips of harder and softer muscles in their intestines and that the squaring of the circle, so to speak, is done by peristaltic movement as the waste moves down the bowel. Why is does so, when nothing else even among the other marsupials, does it is perhaps another question for our researchers Down-under, but it was suggested it may stop the poo rolling down hills as they use it to declare their presence or territories. Apparently, for something which is not considered one of the brightest creatures on the planet, they can do each other serious damage as they fight by offering their rumps, which are almost armour-plated being composed largely of cartilage. They also use their bums to block their burrows when pursued by predators and then to kick with both hind feet like a donkey. Occasionally if a predator gets its head over the back of the wombat in the burrow, the wombat has been known to use its hardened rump to crush the skull of the predator against the roof of the burrow.

But then if you recall many of the Mustelidae advertise their territories through leaving droppings about, otters are one such and the scented droppings are called spraints, and I've analysed quite a few of them playing with minute fish bones trying to identify which came from which species, sometimes to allay angler's irritation which tends to accuse otters of eating all the best fish - and sometimes they do and my analyses did show it. I usually left it to the rangers or wardens of the lakes or ponds to deal with the angry anglers and try to avoid blaming the otters.

Recently a colleague told me that a young male otter was killed by the larger male whose territory he blundered into, so sadly dog(otter) eat dog(otter) is still one of the major laws of nature.