Seven hundred miles away, just outside the small village of Penne. On the edge of a very large oak forest in the south west of France, an edible dormouse named Bernard, waddled across the wooden floor in the attic of the old farmhouse.
The house, that had fallen into disrepair post WW2, was sold to and renovated by retired Swedish Dentist, Kendrick Karlsson, he owned and holidayed in it on and off for ten years until it was sold four years ago to Mr. Door & his wife Ms. Harvey, a retired couple of expats from England.
Kendrick Karlsson, like a lot of other people, saw any sort of mouse as a pest and where possible would deter them from the property. But the first time Mr. Door and Ms. Harvey had seen Bernard’s small confused face they had ahh’d and cooed and had successfully coaxed him out with pieces of Roquefort and grapes. Since then he had become what the English couple called ‘part of the authentic rustic charm of the place’ and would boast about him to visiting friends & relatives.
Bernard’s family had been here for almost two million years since the Pleistocene age. During that time much had stayed the same, as time moves differently for dormice.
A dormouse year is; six of the summer months for which each day, or rather night, is three hours and twenty two minutes long, a dormouse is awake for 25.5 days a year and it spends this time eating & sometimes but not always mating and then 339.5 days of the year sleeping.
The only disruption in the time since the end of the ice age had been during the rule of the Roman Empire when the Edible dormouse got its name. They sold at auction in luxury food markets as a delicious snack to the chefs of roman nobles who served it as a delicacy in rich households, ironically the attics of houses where the mice had been living in to start with.
(Another genius money making tactic of the Roman Empire along with putting bread commercials in the bible).
Tales of these dark and terrifying times were passed down to the younger generations and are still told as bedtime stories by grandmouses to young Edible dormice today.
Bernard was brought up on these stories and knew them by heart, but none of this was of any concern to him as he waddled and staggered across the attic floor at 3.03am on a Thursday in August.
The nice English couple downstairs had left him some cheese, bread, three pistachios and some spilt wine out under the porch table.
On his way home he collected from the rafters above the garage the three carefully stashed acorns he had found after breakfast an hour before. This took quite a long time on account of the 2015 Manoir De L’Emmillé he had slurped off the floor at lunch and which also made the journey home longer than usual.
By the time he reached the attic floor over the bedroom, where Ms. Harvey’s 34 year old jet lagged daughter was trying to sleep, he had dropped each nut several times, had left two behind, was still struggling with the remaining one and muttering to himself trying to work out the best thing to tell his wife Cadence, when he got home late & drunk with only one acorn.
Cadence was used to this behaviour and in fact counted on it. As about the time her husband shuffled through the door, she could hand over the kids to her mother for the bedtime routine and go pick up not just the two nuts her husband had dropped on the way home, but the sack of ten she had gathered and hidden over the two previous mornings and something for dinner from the kitchen.
When she got home the children would’ve been fed, washed and lulled to sleep by Grandmouses tales, her husband would’ve sobered up a bit and they would settle down to dinner & then bed.
Yes life in the third millennia was good for the Edible dormouse.
Written September 2017
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