Now the TARDIS and I have come a long way together – literally and metaphorically (and meta-metaphorically), from the days when neither of us had a clue where we were going, to getting better at short hops, to that funny time when I fixed a Randomiser to the controls in order to avoid the machinations of the Black Guardian. (I managed to dodge him pretty successfully for ages until he popped up again with a stuffed bird on his head. Which I must admit was not what I was expecting.) And then there was that time when I was very fond of cricket (I mean really fond, to the extent that I practically lived in the clobber) when I really didn’t seem to have much luck getting the TARDIS where I wanted her to go. This was the cause of some consternation to my friends at the time, particularly one who, though I was very fond of her, seemed to find the idea of temporal-spatial adventure less enticing than holding down a rather ordinary job. This has been something of a bugbear throughout my travels. Those who embraced their new life with gusto and those who seemed to find it all a bit of a pain in the bum.

But of late I’ve been pretty much able to steer the old girl, barring the odd accident or Celestial Intervention. So it was some disappointment that, instead of landing the Ship in the middle of the Great Exhibition of 1851, we materialised in a very sooty alley in Bradford in 1893.

Clara – dressed up splendidly for the occasion – wrinkled her little nose. ‘You’re making a habit of this. Getting us lost.’

‘I resent that,’ I said. ‘I got you to see the dinosaurs, didn’t I? And you met David Bowie! And we saw the Mirror Falls of Paragonda.’

She had to agree all those things had happened. But she looked about her without much enthusiasm. After all, she knew the North. And this really was a grim bit.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The TARDIS is much better than it used to be. I once spent a helluva long time trying to get a gobby Australian to Heathrow airport.’

‘What for?’

‘Search me. Anyway—’

Then someone screamed. I looked at Clara and she looked at me. This was more like it! I squeezed her arm. ‘Brave heart, Clara!’

*

We ran from the alley and into a mist-shrouded street that ran alongside a canal. The water looked as thick and grey as the air, swirling around rusting perambulators and other discarded rubbish. The woman who’d screamed was being comforted by a man in a big cloth cap but she was still pointing towards something floating in the canal. Something very strange. There was an excitable knot of people gawping at it and a couple of policemen holding them back.