Time’s Servant is Julia’s birthday story for this year. A while before I wrote it, I discussed with my friend Prue where exactly Julia might have come from on Earth, and we decided on Cambridge. That allowed for a brilliant setting for Chrístõ and Julia to explore.

Meanwhile, the drama Einstein and Eddington aired on TV, set around Cambridge Observatory. I would have liked to have done a storyline involving Eddington, who was a very interesting character, but I honestly, even with Eddington played by David Tennant, found myself slightly bewildered by the theories he promulgated. So I made the observatory and its history more of a cameo in a story set in the early twenty-first century.

King’s College Chapel is one of the most famous views of Cambridge University, so that had to get in there, too. The Clock Tower of Trinity College was a surprise to me. I had to look that one up, but when I found it, I knew it was the very place for the dénouement of this story.

St. Cedd’s college is not real, of course. It is the fictional college where Professor Chronotis, the renegade Time Lord, was working in the lost Doctor Who episode, Shada. This story is set some time after those events in Chronotis’s time, but before them in Chrístõ’s/The Doctor’s timeline.

Time as a young, beautiful, but sad woman, owes just a touch to Terry Pratchett, who portrayed her that way in Thief of Time, one of his Discworld novels. In his story Time was seeking her missing son. In this story she wants a mate.

Brasserie Chez Gérard is arguably the best restaurant in Cambridge. It rates well in most of the online guides. I’ve never been to the Cambridge one, but I have eaten at the Manchester branch. The escargot are brilliant and so is the chateaubriand. But I went for the cheeseboard rather than the deserts. It being a real restaurant in a real place, I made sure that the drinking laws were observed. They do have a range of non-alcoholic cocktails as well as the spring water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Observatory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backs
http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=44&stop=3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_College,_Cambridge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Cedd%27s_College,_Cambridge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_of_Time

http://www.brasseriechezgerard.co.uk/