Natalie is the answer to the question of Julia’s chaperone. The first part of this story was written about the time that Julia’s first story had gone online. But I didn’t complete it until a few weeks later.

The name ‘Natalie’ was chosen because I kept hearing the name being called, every night, around five o’clock in the evening. Somebody in the neighbourhood is called Natalie and has a very bad sense of time or direction, or both. I’m not even sure WHO she is, having never identified the person being called. But I decided that I was going to have a character called Natalie who got lost often. As it happened, Natalie become a more tragic character than comedy. Her habit of getting lost was the reason she was left on the radiation-filled ship she was rescued from. Natalie was doomed from the start.

A character who was dying of a terminal illness was part of Chrístõ’s learning curve. As a long lived Time Lord he was not accustomed to death. It was something he would come to terms with. It was an unfortunate idea, though, because these stories ARE read by people from all over the world with different problems in their real lives, and cancer is something that touches many people in a real way. Natalie was not a comfortable character for many readers. But in fact she DID come to be loved by them.

I aimed, also, to create a character who was not perfect looking. The Doctor has always travelled with attractive women. Natalie is over forty, overweight, short and dumpy, and not pretty in the accepted sense of the world. That Chrístõ learns to see beauty beyond face value through her is another important lesson for him.

The second part of the story was a separate story idea that I had. I put them together as one story because both were too short to stand alone. But it works because it shows Natalie’s true colours as a brave woman who won’t be bullied and stands up for the weak. Just the qualities Chrístõ would admire.