Leavings....

12 July 2018

After juggling two and a bit jobs for the past six or seven months with secondments and 'acting' roles, they have worn me down and I am finally changing jobs permanently.  This is very sad, as I liked my old job, but my colleagues put on a great leaving party, complete with TARDIS piñata. 

I really hope someone got a picture of the distinguished professor of English Literature bashing it with a miniature cricket bat!

My leaving speech was short: the Tenth Doctor's final words.

Update: I returned later to the office to retrieve the TARDIS (yes, that was me carrying it home on the train).  The following morning I wasn't in and I got a panicked email from a colleague:

"You didn’t by any chance come in early this morning to take the TARDIS? It’s gone and Barbara and Ian are going into detective mode. (You just missed a moment in the office that you might have cherished when Ian could be overheard saying on the phone ‘we had a TARDIS in the office and…’.)*"

 *Names have been changed.  Obviously.

By coincidence, one of my colleagues in my new role is the person who was briefly my boss elsewhere and who bought me a Cyberman book and Dalek poster as a leaving present.

My TARDIS has a screw loose...

Saturday 29 October 2016

We have a storage problem: not enough room for our DVDs.   Husband has a brilliant idea: if he throws out all his remaining old Doctor Who VHS tapes we can no longer watch (he has slowly been replacing them with DVDs), then the Doctor Who DVDs can go in the TARDIS video cabinet, making space in our other storage units.

Problem 1: Find the autograph.  I distinctly remember Colin Baker signing a VHS cassette at the Who shop that briefly appeared in Little Chalfont, whilst avoiding falling Silurian masks.  Obviously we don't want to throw that one out. But none of the VHS tapes in the TARDIS are of Sixth Doctor stories. The later VHS tapes are downstairs, but the only Sixth Doctor story we have left is Trial of a Time Lord, and that hasn't been signed.  Have we already ditched the autograph by mistake? 

Problem solved: Husband finds the autographed cassette.  It turns out to be the 1994 Bill Baggs Video The Zero Imperative, starring Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, John Pertwee, Caroline John, Louise Jameson, Sophie Aldred and Linda Lusardi. (Spot the odd one out...) There is also an appearance by the writer, a young man called Mark Gatiss.  I wonder what happened to him?

Problem 2: DVDs are slightly deeper than VHS tapes.  The doors of the TARDIS no longer close properly, and one of them comes off completely.  Husband has another (not so) brilliant idea: we take the other door off to match.

I have a better idea: we put the Virgin New Adventures and Missing Adventures in the TARDIS, and the DVDs on the bookshelf.

The books fit, and I wield my (totally un-sonic) screwdriver to fix the doors.

Just one problem left.  Where shall we keep The Zero Imperative?

My kingdom for a Sonic Screwdriver!

The TARDIS video cabinet took a long time to arrive, mainly because the delivery company kept trying to deliver it when we were out, rather than at the pre-arranged time. Eventually they left it with our neighbours, three doors down.

By the time we eventually took possession of it, we were really impatient, and couldn't bear to wait any longer.  This was unfortunate, as the cabinet came as a flatpack, and the supplier had somehow omitted to include the screws.  It was a Saturday,  I was all geared up with my (non-sonic) screwdriver,* and didn't want to wait another week for an opportunity to assemble it, so I called the company and asked them for the size of the screws and fittings.

Armed with this information, I dashed round to our local hardware store.  This was, and still is, an old-fashioned establishment. Think Two Ronnies  'Four Candles' sketch.  I went up to the counter, gave them my most confident, 'I may be a woman, but I know how to handle a screwdriver' smile, and asked for the items on my list.

Cue much head-scratching.  'I don't think we have any of those. What do you want them for?' asked the sales assistant.

'Building a TARDIS....'

.....

Much, much later, I finally finished assembling the TARDIS, using screws that were very nearly the right size. I must have done something right - 21 year's later it's still standing, and even survived a house move.

*In case you are wondering why I was doing this, my husband didn't own a screwdriver. His role was to make the tea.