New Year, New Start

In which The Author makes some resolutions

WARNING – PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW

On New Year’s Day I shed several tears as the Last of the Time Lords came to terms with his own imminent end, and used his remaining time to say goodbye to his old friends. David Tennant said very little during these sequences, but his face displayed the full range of his acting skill.

Freema Agyeman made a brief but welcome return as Martha, now teamed up with Mickey as freelance alien hunters. John Barrowman’s Captain Jack Harkness appeared in a very clever scene, where Russell T. Davies revisited all the weird and wonderful creations which have entertained us over the past five years – and (naturally) Jack was on the pull. The scene where the Doctor met Joan Redfern’s great-granddaughter at the signing of A Journal of Impossible Things, filmed inside the bookshop where I used to work, was particularly poignant. The Doctor even turned up at Donna’s wedding (keeping out of her sight, of course), but he spoke to Wilf and Sylvia and gave them a present for Donna – a winning lottery ticket from the future.

Finally he returned to the Powell Estate in south London, where he encountered Rose and Jackie on their way home on New Year’s Day 2005, shortly before his first meeting with Rose. Cunningly concealed in the shadows, he exchanged a few words with them before collapsing in the street. He crawled back to the TARDIS and hit the controls, knowing that the lethal dose of radiation he’d absorbed while saving Wilf’s life was taking effect.

As the Tenth Doctor saw the regeneration energy burst from his hands, he said, ‘I don’t want to go.’ I looked at the screen and said, ‘I don’t want you to go.’ Then the regeneration process began in earnest and my childhood hero embarked on the next stage of his life, in the body of the as-yet unproven Matt Smith.

So why am I writing about something about which we all watched anyway? It’s because, like the Doctor, I’m starting a new chapter in my life – and like the post-Donna Tenth Doctor, it’s one where I don’t want a female companion.

I’ve wasted too much of the last year pursuing a girl who doesn’t know what she wants. Jenny turned up briefly to the pub on New Year’s Eve, but had to dash off after one drink owing to ‘family commitments’ which also kept her busy during the whole of New Year’s Day, apparently. That’s the only time that I’ve seen her during the whole of the three-week university break. I’ve seen far more of Carys and Shanara than I have of a girl who claims to be crazy about me, but who seems to be little but a pathological liar.

Jenny can’t even decide whether her mother lives in Swindon or Pontypridd, or whether her mother’s got a girlfriend or three boyfriends at once. She claims to have spent some time with her aunt in Calne over Xmas, but when I asked her about Dr Alsop’s White Horse at Cherhill, a mile or so away – arguably Calne’s only famous feature – she’d never heard of it.

Apparently she lost her phone down the side of the chair for a day or two while she was staying at her mother’s house – possibly her mother in Swindon, which would make the Calne story a little more plausible.

Yesterday I had a drink and a chat with an old friend of mine, who’s being messed about with by a guy she’s keen on. We decided to make a pact there and then. We both said, ‘Fuck the players!’ and deleted their numbers at the same time, so that we couldn’t give into the temptation to drink and dial. About an hour later, Jenny texted me. I deleted it unread.

2010: New Year; new Doctor; new start.

And a New Year’s Resolution: I’m going to meet the only woman in the world who can be where she says she’s going to be, when she says she’s going to be there.

Oh – and I’m also going to solve the world’s energy crisis, bring about the end of all wars, lead the first manned expedition to Mars, and develop cures for cancer, HIV and malaria.

After the first one, the rest should be easy …