Making the TARDIS a place Marion felt safe in was the first idea I had for this story, hence the addition of a comfortable sofa and a coffee table. Marion takes off her shoes and feels at home. She is beginning to come to terms with being the companion of a Time Lord. Of course, The Doctor’s TARDIS never instantly acquired furniture like that, but there is no reason why it can’t.

Mostly this story advances what Marion knows about Time Lords and TARDISes. She learns that it takes three hours to slowly orbit the Earth three times, and that Time Lords have a code of honour and nothing untoward would happen to her in that time. She learns that a TARDIS can’t be seen by Earth radar and that there are, as far as Kristoph knows, only two Time Lords on Earth right at that time – himself and the traitor he seeks. In fact, Doctor Who fans would be able to mention at least two more. There is Professor Chronotis, presumably still at St Cedd’s College, Cambridge and K’Anpo Rinpoche in his Tibetan retreat at the very least. But they’re both well out of the way of Marion and Kristoph’s warm, sweet life at the moment. And so is the ‘traitor’.

The story about the Gallifreyan students who pretended to be Greek gods and invented the Greek alphabet is my way of explaining why, exactly, The Doctor was called Theta Sigma at school and allows me to give his father the name of Qoppa Lambda. The letters don’t mean anything, of course. I chose them as a change from the more popular Greek letters of American fraternity houses and the like.

Of course, these very short stories of between 1,500 and 2,000 words don’t go very far in terms of dramatic incident. But they are slowly telling the story of a Time Lord and his love affair with an Earth Child, and that is the point of them, after all.