Or at least marrying a Doctor Who fan changed my life. By that I don't just mean the Daleks in the bathroom and the ever-expanding DVD and novelisation collection colonising all the available storage space.
No, marrying a fan all those years ago brought about a sequence of events that has led to my paddling a canoe on the Orinoco, travelling on the Trans-Siberian express and extolling the virtues of High Wycombe on local radio, as well as becoming far better acquainted with the works of Shakespeare than ever seemed likely. You see it's like this. I happened to be a member of Mensa. (Honestly, it's not that difficult - I got sucked into doing the test after entering a competition when I was 17 and thought it would be a good thing to put on my UCAS form.) After we were married, my husband was looking through my magazine, and noticed that there was a Doctor Who special interest group, so persuaded me to sign up for it. Fast forward a year or so and the Doctor Who SIG was seeking contributions for Future Imperfect, multi-author story for the 30th anniversary, and my husband wanted to join in, so he joined Mensa as well. (I told you it wasn't that difficult!)
Before long, he heard that there was a vacancy for editor of the newsletter for the Travel special interest group, and as he was getting interested in desktop publishing, he volunteered. After a while he put together an anthology of some of the best contributions which was published for charity. Through the special interest group he got to interview Hilary Bradt of Bradt Guides, attended one of their travel writing workshops and later went on to win a travel writing competition.
Next, he decided to write a travel book himself, based on the places that Wombles were named after (Doctor Who is not the only programme from our childhoods that has made a big impression.) He didn't want to travel alone, so Muggins became assistant researcher and photographer, as we travelled up the Orinoco, by train to Tomsk, walked in Bulgaria, ate French food in Cholet etc. You get the idea. Despite the fact that I ended up paddling a dugout canoe while he remained safely on dry land 'looking after the camera' I can't really complain about this, as I have a nagging feeling that I might have been responsible for the original idea.
The next project is a guidebook of our local area for Bradt. This time I am not only assistant researcher and photographer, but co-author and exhibit A, as I have lived all my life in the area and can trace my local connection back for centuries.
Meanwhile, as is obvious from the rest of this blog, I decided that the best way to live with a Doctor Who fan was to become one. As regular readers may have inferred, I became particularly keen on the Tenth Doctor, as played by David Tennant. So it was not surprising that I wanted to see his Hamlet. A few years later we went to see David in Richard II. I saw from the programme that the RSC was embarking on a cycle of the entire repertoire of Shakepeare's plays over a six year period, and thought that it would be good for my general education to see them all. Now I'm a Patron of the RSC and we visit Stratford several times a year.
It's possible that some of these things might have happened without Doctor Who but I doubt it.
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