Well, essentially, it just has to be published.

But when I was looking at the upcoming releases in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, after reading the first novel, I came across Libba Brays’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, apparently the first in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy.

Normally, I wouldn’t look twice at a book called A Great and Terrible Beauty, assuming it to be a historical romance of some sort.

Then I saw the first line of the Amazon blurb:

“A Victorian boarding school story, a Gothic mansion mystery, a gossipy romp about a clique of girlfriends, and a dark other-worldly fantasy—jumble them all together and you have this complicated and unusual first novel.”

Yep—pretty much going to have to buy that.

After all, I own an entire bookcase’s worth of girls’ school stories and—while a lot of them tell me about passionate friendships, the rules of lacrosse, and how to win for your house—not one of them is set in “a girls’ academy with a mysterious burned-out East Wing.”

I have a feeling that I might have been a little over-eager in my rejection of vampires.

I mentioned in that post that I’d just bought Twilight, the first in Stephenie Meyer’s four-part series about, to borrow the terms used in the blurb, a high-school vampire romance.

I know—I was surprised when I bought it as well.

I bought it because it came to my attention as a book that had become something of a phenomenon, and I figured that if I continue labelling myself a bibliophile, I really should judge these things for myself.

Although I suspect that I came to this a little late—I’ve never been a trend-setter, but I do usually get onto these things a little earlier than this. I managed to come to Harry Potter before the real media frenzy built up, after all—not right at the beginning, but early enough to feel a bit smug. (You know, privately.)

(To counter that, though, I didn’t come across Green Wing until four years after it aired in the U. K., which is chastening enough to dampen the Harry Potter smugness.)

I have a vague recollection, if I’m to be totally honest, that I didn’t come across Twilight until I started seeing information about the forthcoming movie adaptation.

You see, it’s so far outside my normal realms of interest.

I read a lot of young-adult fiction—but it’s mostly fantasy. I tend to find that—with exceptions such as Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes saga—most of the innovative, fascinating writing in this genre is aimed at young adults, for some reason.

And I don’t often buy either vampire fiction of any description or horror fiction. (The exception to these two rules is sitting on a shelf behind me, however: I do own the first 30 Days of Night trade, because the concept fascinated me so much. I haven’t read it yet; Nick scared me by telling me to make sure I read it during the day.)

But I bought Twilight and, since I’ve been marking all day and Nick’s been out all night at a Belgian-beer cafe, I read it tonight in one sitting.

That should be sufficient to demonstrate that I enjoyed it much more than I was anticipating.

I wasn’t sure what I’d make of a vampire romance set in high school. The very concept sets off warring reactions.

I’m really not keen to relive high school. I enjoyed high school in terms of the friendships that I made there and the people I got to socialise with. I was also a girly swot—still am, actually—so I enjoyed the academic side of things.

But I didn’t like high school in general; in fact, when I’m very tired or under a lot of pressure, I still often have dreams that I’m back in high school, and that they won’t listen to me when I tell them that I should be able to leave since I already have two degrees.

On the other hand, I’m keen on a good romance narrative these days.

Put the two together, though, and you have a romance between teenagers—which is a bit of a tiring prospect.

But not always—I thoroughly enjoyed I Capture the Castle when I read it a couple of years ago (although the protagonists, while young, aren’t precisely high schoolers) and even got a kick out of The (now somewhat dated) Constant Nymph, with its fraught romance between a young girl and her cousin’s husband.

And I didn’t find this romance irritating, either.

Part of that might have been the prose, which was measured and deliberate without being frustrating—and nicely copy edited, which is important to me these days. With the exception of one incorrect irregular verb—“lay” where it should have been “lie”—nothing leapt out at me.

(Unlike my most recent reprints of Dorothy L. Sayers, which I think must have been prepared on character-recognition software, there are so many frustrating errors.)

But I think what intrigued me was the presentation of the vampires.

I’m not sure that vampires have ever been static characters: the mythos is too varied across the different cultures that believe in blood-suckers for them to have ever been effectually standardised, a point that this novel makes quite neatly.

But since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire made radical shifts to the textual presentation of vampires, authors have been playing with their depiction.

Twilight doesn’t make any extraordinary alterations to the basic nature of vampires—they still need to drink blood and avoid sunlight, although they don’t sleep in coffins, thankfully—but she does tweak the characters in ways that allow interesting plot developments.

I don’t want to mention spoilers, and I’m not going into the plot, so there’s not much I can say about how the characterisation of the vampires works.

But one thing did intrigue me: the repeated emphasis on the coldness of their skin and their closer resemblance to the artificiality of statues than to humans. I think that’s where my interest in the book really lay: the construction of alienness.

Not a unique gift, perhaps—but one that always interests me when it’s done well.

I guess when it comes down to it, I’m not particularly interested in reading books about ordinary humans living their lives.

But, ultimately, this book is only the first of a four-part saga. I’m going to have to read the rest, now, before I can decide what I really think.

I haven’t had time to update lately, because I’ve been buried under an enormous pile of assessment.

I did start a rambling post of snippets I’d found amusing over the years, but then forgot half the ones I’d wanted to write about.

I’ll finish that one soon.

But I did have this conversation with Nick this afternoon. (Nick, on that note, wants me to change the name of this blog to “Life with Nick,” but I think that’s a little narcissistic on his part.)

Ever since I read a newspaper article that defined Generation Y as people born between 1977 and 1992, I’ve been teasing Nick about being Gen-Y—while I, as the (slightly) older woman, get to be the much cooler Gen-X.

I was teasing him about this again today.

ME: Well, you’re Gen-Y, of course.
NICK: I’m not sure I accept that.
ME: Well, it said so in the paper—from 1977 on.
NICK: Yes, but these things tended to happen later in New Zealand.

I thought that was a clever comeback from someone who identifies his country as slightly delayed.

A slightly cranky conversation (on my part), from which Nick emerges with the honours:

NICK (reading): You see, if you know a lot about the early history of Microsoft, you can kind of see the emaciated corpse of various early designs . . .
ME: Honestly, can we stop with the purple prose?
NICK: Well, I’m sorry, Mrs Pellucid.

(As a kind of payment for allowing me to blog this conversation, Nick has insisted that I add, as an addendum, the fact that I’ve just sat here muttering, “Shift button. Shift button. Do I have a shift button? Oh—it’s the one with ‘shift’ written on it.”

Nick and I were watching an episode of Veronica Mars during dinner, and we came across Veronica musing that the downside to keeping a diary was that anyone could find it and learn your darkest secrets.

“Well, yes,” I said to Nick. “That’s why you should just keep a blog.”

I’ve had a heavy marking load this past three days, as a result of taking a break from my work when family came to visit, so I was exhausted when Nick arrived home. Being the attentive partner that he is, he offered me a glass of wine.

NICK: I think you deserve a glass of the Semillon Chardonnay.
ME: Well, that and the fact the that the Semillon Chardonnay is the only screw-top bottle in the fridge.

There’s something to be said for a partner who considers your needs above his own convenience.

Mind, this Semillon Chardonnay is lovely.

This must be about the fifth entry I’ve written on television advertising, but I never cease to be amazed by what they actually think is suitable for advertising.

On the one hand, I’ve just seen an advertisement for the Trading Post that suggests the best way to deal with your uncontrollable son and his tendency to violently shove his sister is to buy a swing-set.

True, I suppose it channels that strong desire to experiment with the potentialities of kinetic energy.

But what happens when the child ends up in an environment with no swing-set?

But the strangest advertisement I’ve seen all night is one for APIA, with Max Walker—at least, I’m fairly certain it was Max Walker—talking about being duped in the purchase of a diamond while on an African tour.

I think, from what I can remember, that the whole point was the idea that age brings wisdom.

But I saw it and said to Nick, “Did they really just build an entire advertising campaign around Max Walker attempting to buy an unregistered African diamond? A blood diamond?”

Honestly, I thought the Pepsi Max advertisement where they suggested that drinking that particular soft drink would make random businesswomen rip off half their clothes and wrestle in a spilled consignment of jelly was the oddest thing I’d ever seen on television.

Nick and I have a fairly large number of shared interests, which always make co-habitation a little easier; I’m not always making him watch romantic comedies (although, action-film fan that I am, I did draw the line at Hitman Uncut last night: it was grotesquely violent and exploitative) and he’s not obsessed with sport, so we don’t end up living a life with a horrible resemblance to an American prime-time sit-com.

(Although I am obsessed with sport; well, I’m obsessed with football, anyway. But Nick just ignores the fact that I watch every game of each World Cup and get up at 4.30 a.m. to watch Liverpool win the Champion’s League final.)

But sometimes, our interests seem to diverge more than usual.

For example, I have spent today (after waking at 6.30 a.m.—on a Sunday!—to find that my fan had snapped in half during the night, a stranger than usual occurrence) sitting in the living room marking an enormous pile of assessment.

Nick, on the other hand, has pulled out a borrowed copy of Overlord—which he always describes as “the game written by Rhianna Pratchett”—and has apparently spent most of the afternoon carving a violent swathe through an environment that looks disturbingly like Hobbiton, complete with underground dwellings with round doors.

It’s all right, though; I think these are evil hobbits.

And I get to stop marking soon, so we can get back to our usual Sunday night activities of mocking Robin Hood and squabbling about what we’re going to watch afterwards.

After all, shared interests don’t have to equal perpetual consensus: that would be dull.

Happily watching a movie on a Saturday night, I ended up having the following conversation.

ME: Why are we watching this movie?
NICK: What?
ME: They just blew that guy up after chopping his arm off!
NICK: Well, they blew all the other guys up as well.

Somehow, I don’t find that an mitigating factor.

The latest set in Packrat—the Facebook game that’s hands down the best application on the site—is called “The Quest for Montezuma.” The creators specify that it’s a tricky set, largely because you need an enormous number of maize cards and gold coin cards to make any of the high-end items.

Three maize cards will make a patolli game; three patolli games will make a codex. Three gold coins will make a spotted leopard; three spotted leopards will make a turquoise mask. Then you use the turquoise mask to make Montezuma’s headdress.

To complete the set, then—as far as gold coins alone go—you need to vault the coin itself, then a spotted leopard (another three coins), then a turquoise mask (another nine coins, to make three leopards), then another mask to make the headdress (another nine coins, or three leopards.) That’s a total of 23 gold coins to complete the set.

You need an almost equal number of maize cards, and of rubber trees, which you use to make rubber balls, then a Toltec warrior (by combining three rubber balls), then an Aztec temple (by combining the warrior, a map, and a conquistador’s helmet.)

That’s fine, as far as maize and rubber trees go—they don’t appear for sale very often, but you can buy them at the markets.

But those elusive 23 gold coins! To make the quest harder, it seems, the creators have limited the release of gold coins. You can’t buy them at the markets; instead, they’re pop-up cards (which randomly appear as you flick through your friends’ packs) and vault bonuses (which appear in your pack once you’ve vaulted a set of five or more cards from another set.)

Except that they never pop up for me.

Well, okay—once. Which isn’t much help when you need 23 of them.

And I don’t think they’re popping up that regularly for other people, since they don’t seem to be turning up in other people’s packs.

And although the aim of the game is to steal cards from other people to complete your sets, many of us aim to play co-operatively: to not steal cards from our friends unless they’ve given us permission. I prefer to play this way, because I don’t have the guilt of stealing cards that people have been husbanding, hoping to complete a set, and I know they will treat my pack the same way.

But it does make it difficult to get those elusive gold coins.

To make it worse, I’m somewhat addicted to Packrat, and I’ve completed—to the best of my ability, barring a couple of special delivery cards that I’ve never even seen—every other set currently available. So I have no other option but to work on “The Quest for Montezuma.”

On the plus side, I’m collecting quite a nice stash of credits in my futile flicking through other people’s packs trying to find gold coins.

But on the other hand, I hope they release some more new sets soon. There’s a limit to how many patolli games I’m willing to make, if there’s no possibility of more spotted leopards or turquoise masks in my future.

I’m feeling a little melodramatic tonight—not exactly a rare occurrence. Tonight, I think it’s because I’m wearing a floor-length, swishy, velvet skirt, an absurd quantity of bangles—quite why I’m wearing a wristful of Indian bangles while sitting in my own living room enjoying a quiet drink is a bit of a mystery, even to me—and a long cardigan. It’s an ensemble guaranteed to make anyone feel melodramatic.

(And to those who question the inherent coolness of a good cardigan, I shall simply point to the example of Kurt Cobain.)

So, I’ve decided that the best way to harness this melodramatic frame of mind is to listen to some covers of Jimi Hendrix songs and blog about vampires, while waiting for dinner to be ready.

Because the thing is that I’m actually not a big fan of vampires.

Or, more properly, I’m not a big fan of vampire fiction, which is why I put this under “Books” instead of “Television.” (Naturally, I’m also not a big fan of actual vampires: they’re insanely powerful bloodsuckers, and I don’t place much faith in that “can’t enter unless they’re invited” caveat. But, then, to balance that there is the idea that they don’t actually exist—that must be given due weight, I suppose.)

I loved Dracula when I first read it and realised how very different it was from any adaptation I’d ever seen—and I love seeing students’ reactions to it, when they experience it for the first time.

I simultaneously enjoyed and was slightly horrified by Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula. I always did have a soft spot for poor Jack Seward, which is probably partly inspired by the fact that he was once played by Richard E. Grant. But I’ve never read the later books, although Nick owns them all.

I’ve also been reading—intermittently—the Kim Harrison series of alternate history urban fantasies, which have a strong vampire component, and The Dresden Files, which are veering more and more into vampire-focused plots at the stage I’m up to, which is currently the fourth book.

I’ve also recently bought the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, purely, in this case, because I felt I was out of the loop on something that I should probably judge for myself.

But, that lengthy series of exceptions aside, I rarely buy anything from the section of shelving that bookshops are increasingly labelling “Vampire Fiction.”

And I have no patience with the Interview with a Vampire series. I’ve read the first book—I’ve even taught classes on the first book—and I can see both the impact on contemporary horror fiction of Anne Rice’s re-visioning of the vampire and the fascination of the Anne Rice cult. But I really didn’t like the first book, and didn’t fancy reading the later ones.

But to balance this, I rather like vampire films and television. Within reason, anyway.

I was a big fan of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer—until season 5. I did keep watching after that, right until the end, but in common with a lot of fans I felt it lost something of its focus at that point. I liked Spike, but then I’d liked Angel as well, and if Buffy had been willing to kill Angel, why would she so fiercely defend Spike against the people whom he had injured?

I enjoyed Angel as well, although there the disappointment rather worked in reverse: season 1 wasn’t fantastic, to my mind, but it was still finding its feet and it worked itself into an interesting concept (although I do miss Glenn Quinn; I did like him in both Roseanne and Angel.)

But even when it comes to television, I’m not a big fan of vampire-themed shows.

Except for Ultraviolet, which Nick and I are rewatching now (after a brief and ultimately futile discussion as to which of us has been stalling on re-watching it since I bought it for him some years ago: I say him, he says me.)

I suppose, it one wished to be pedantic, you could claim that Ultraviolet isn’t, technically, a vampire show, since they never say the word “vampire” at all. When they do decide, around about episode two, that they do need a general noun, they call them “leeches.” In fact, Nick swears when it first came out it was advertised in such a way that he thought it was about a fraud investigation squad, and nearly didn’t watch it.

But, sophistry aside, it is one of the cleverest vampire-focused shows I’ve ever seen, and it’s holding up now, ten years after it was released (which is scary enough as it is; I don’t like thinking that ten years can pass since a show that I watched as an adult aired on free-to-air television.)

So while I don’t want to end every blog post by wavering away from my original point—I have fears that my blog will end permanently tentative and lacking any firm opinions—I suppose I do have one final caveat.

I’m really not that interested in vampires—unless they’re key characters in sexy British programmes starring Jack Davenport.

And, let’s face it, that doesn’t happen nearly often enough.

The strangest thing happened today, while I was sitting innocently, if belatedly, marking my students’ assessment and occasionally checking my e-mail. I had a browser open, to check some references, and was occasionally brushing a hand over the track pad to stop the computer from going to sleep.

That is, until I heard eerie music—and looked up to find that I’d somehow managed to enter The Church of Scientology’s video channel, and was being informed that it was the only major religion to emerge in the twentieth century via a montage of smiling children.

I think I managed to shut it down before they convinced me of the validity of their beliefs, but I’m going to keep a close eye on myself, just in case I manifest a sudden desire to write large donation cheques.

I find it even stranger that this happened not a week after Nick and I, in company with visiting family, had lunch directly opposite a large anti-Scientology gathering in the city.

For some reason, most of the protestors were wearing V for Vendetta style Guy Fawkes masks, which—while awesome in the film—start to look odder and odder the longer you stare at them.

Especially when several of the people wearing them are also wearing incongruent costumes: call me odd, but I don’t think a Guy Fawkes mask works well with a lime-green Zoot suit and fedora ensemble.

I am, however, starting to wonder why Scientology is suddenly popping up everywhere I look, even when I’m simply trying to eat lunch or mark some assignments.

Spooky.

I’ve been meaning to say something about this since the second season ended, now that the Sam Tyler story arc has been wound up—so, yes, this is spoileriffic. But, frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about the resolution.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first season, despite the fact that we were watching Life on Mars when the second car (in a series of three, so far) drove through the fence, completely destroying my car and much of the surrounding property—it wasn’t Life on Mars‘s fault, but the programme did tend to trigger jumpiness for a few weeks after that.

But the first season was fantastic: the concept was clever, Philip Glenister was a joy to behold in every scene, and John Simm’s appearance as Sam—despite the fact that the character was not at all evil—made me very keen to see what he could do as The Master. And the answer to that turned out to be more a case of what couldn’t he do? I’d been looking forward to the return of The Master since the new series started; I kept saying to Nick that there was no chance that The Master returned to fight and die for Gallifrey, no chance. And I was right.

(On a slightly disconnected note, Nick and I also have an ongoing debate about his preference for the wonderful Roger Delgado and mine for The Master of my times, Anthony Ainley, who I’ve only just realised died four years ago. Vale, Anthony Ainley. So I was pleased that we both enjoyed John Simm’s version of the character.)

To get back to my main point, I was a little uncertain about the return of the show for a second season.

I am—as will come to no surprise to a readership comprised at the stage almost entirely of people who already know me—a media tart, capable of becoming strongly attached to particular programmes. I respond badly to my favourite shows being cut off in their prime, although I am flexible about what constitutes “prime”: for example, Firefly was cut off in its prime, while Angel, which I would happily have kept watching, doesn’t qualify, not after a run of five seasons.

And I’d enjoyed Life on Mars enough to want to keep watching it. What worried me was the fact that the concept might end up too thinly stretched. Some shows, no matter how good, need to end before the concept can become stale: Joe Ahearne’s wonderful Ultraviolet might still be one of the best instances of this. I would have watched more of that, but perhaps it is better that it ended at six superb episodes.

And it did seem at first as though the concept might have staled a little: the show wasn’t quite as funny nor quite as creepy as it had once been, although the episode where Gene Hunt was suspected of murder brightened things up a little.

Then we got to the final episode and, as the credits rolled, I turned to Nick to say, “Did what I think just happened actually just happen?”

Basically, my feelings about the show became thoroughly confused the minute Sam jumped off the roof.

But perhaps this is best encapsulated in a conversation that I ended up having with my mother (which I may not, after a period of some weeks, have reproduced verbatim):

MUM: What did you think of the end of Life on Mars?
ME: He killed himself!
MUM: I thought it was lovely; it brought back all the humour, which had been a bit missing from the episode.
ME: But he killed himself!
MUM: Because he was happier in the ’70s.
ME: But he wasn’t in the ’70s—he jumped off a roof.
MUM: But he was happier.
ME: But why did I spend twelve weeks of my life watching a character struggle to get back to his real life only to have him jump off a roof?

And I think that’s my main problem; it was out of character. I don’t want to characterise suicide as essentially a defeatist action, but in this case it was: after a brief period of isolation, the man who we’d seen struggling against all odds to return to his normal life gave up spectacularly and threw himself off a roof.

It didn’t seem in keeping with what we’d seen of Sam’s character up to that point.

(It also didn’t say much for the Metropolitan Police’s counselling of recuperative officers, but that’s a different matter.)

Nick tells me that the suicide reading—that Sam was genuinely hallucinating the 1970s’ episodes and managed to recover from the accident, only to kill himself—is writer and co-creator Matthew Graham’s preferred reading. (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Graham is also, apparently, the writer of Doctor Who‘s “Fear Her,” which I frankly loathed.)

But there are alternative options. The main one, it seems to me, is the option offered by the surgeon in his alternative role as the high-ranking policeman from Hyde: that Sam, deep undercover, suffered a breakdown as the result of an accident in the 1970s, and that it is the modern life that is the hallucination. In this reading, the blue-tinted return to modern life at the end of the last episode would be the result of a psychotic break that Sam suffered in the tunnel, under the pressure of the shoot-out.

This would answer one small, but perhaps significant, question that the final episode raised for me, which was why, when Sam awoke in hospital after apparently undergoing brain surgery, was his head not shaved?

But perhaps I am grasping at straws here, to explain what was to me an unsatisfying conclusion.

Perhaps I should accept instead that sometimes, when we die, we go to the 1970s. It might be an improvement on dying and going to Devon.

I’ve already done this recently, with things that have made me happy. But I’m feeling slightly odd, today—partly because I’m intensely tired and partly because I can’t be sure how well I did today with my lecture and tutorials: I seem to have lost the ability to read a room—and I’m frustrated by the fact that I haven’t had a chance to update recently. So cranky it is.

Mildly cranky, mind. Nothing that won’t be cured by a good night’s sleep.

1. Melancholic endings. (This goes for both books and television.)

Happy endings, people. Please? I just want my favourite fictional characters to be happy and healthy. It’s fiction—that’s where we all get to live happily ever after. (I’m living happily ever after already, but for argument’s sake . . .)

Unhappy endings have their own beauty, certainly—but more happy endings, please.

(I suspect the only way to get around this is to read more spoilers, so I know exactly what’s happening. But, really, spoilers just—ironically—spoil everything.)

2. That I need to tidy my living-room again, before my father-in-law comes around for dinner tomorrow night. The coming-around-to-dinner part is fine, but I really don’t want to have to tidy the living room. I’m sure I only tidied it recently.

3. The fact that I’ve just heard “Ode to Joy” on the television, and thought “Hey, it’s that song that South Korean fans sing at football games.” I mean, honestly. I’m sure I used to be cultured once.

(Now I’m reminding myself of the snobby conversation in Bridget Jones’s Diary—the novel—where they suggest that you shouldn’t be allowed to listen to the World Cup theme unless you’d sat through Turandot.)

4. That I’m smoking like a chimney at the moment. Why? No idea. But there you are.

5. I mentioned this at the top, but I seem to have lost the ability to read a room. I’m sure that I used to be able to do this, but I noticed this shift at my prospectus presentation a few years ago, when I egregiously misread the room—there were no consequences, but I was shocked.

I’m not sure why this happened, but it’s throwing me a little.

6. A conversation I had with Nick recently, which he’s forbidden me from blogging about, but the end result is that we’re getting a new television.

(Is it just me, or does that entry make us sound really dysfunctional?)

7. The weather. I know that I put this at the top of my list of things that have made me happy, but now I’ve changed my mind. Where’s the cold weather?

8. The way the sets in Packrat that I haven’t vaulted are really difficult to collect, and I’m having to buy everything—the rats don’t have anything worth stealing, these days.

Oddly, writing the list has made me feel a lot less cranky. Although, I will add one more item, in passing.

9. The fact that Nick has insisted on picking a television programme, and has now just run off, for no apparent reason and without warning, to play on the Internet. This, despite the fact that he now has a device that allows him to surf the Internet from anywhere in the house (and, his new hobby, in bed).

Nope, definitely feel less cranky now. So, having picked the topic of “Things That Make Me Cranky,” I’m going to have to leave the list there, before it becomes apparent that it’s a complete misnomer.

Ah, blog. Is there nothing that you can’t do?

Since my sister and my sister-in-law are visiting for a short period, we’ve been rewatching some episodes of Doctor Who: my sister never saw the first episode of Season 3—“Smith and Jones”—or the Christmas special that came between Seasons 3 and 4. And, of course, we now have the first episode of Season 4—and episode 2 to come, as of this weekend.

So we’ve been rewatching them, starting with “Smith and Jones.” And the rewatching is bringing up certain responses to the programme that have been somewhat deadened over the nine months or so since the last season ended.

I have a main point, but the first thing I always think with the new season is that it’s too Earth-bound. I did—and do—love John Pertwee, but at least he had a reason for being Earth-bound. Even then, you started to long for a space episode, which is where “The Curse of Peladon” was such a joy—well, that and the fact that David Troughton was in it.

But the revamped series doesn’t seem to have an justification for the fact that it’s so Earth-bound, and it did start to irritate me a little in Season 3. Sometimes, the Earth focus worked: “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances” were glorious episodes. And Torchwood is completely Earth-bound, and that works. But every now and then I start to want an episode set in space: the TARDIS doesn’t just travel in time, and while Shakespeare is wonderful, so are the occasional cat-people.

But the main thing that broke my heart—and still breaks my heart when I think about it—was the departure of Martha.

I loved Martha. She still sits as number three on my list of all-time favourite companions. And I say that as a life-long Doctor Who fan, someone who remembers Tom Baker from the original airing of the episodes.

My all-time favourite companion is still, and will always be, Ace. Part of the appeal of Ace, for me, is that she was the closest in age to me of all the Doctor’s companions, which had its own attraction. But I also loved the dynamic between Ace and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, the “Professor.” And Ace was also the companion for some of the stories that are still my favourites: “Ghostlight,” “The Curse of Fenric,” “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.”

Next to Ace comes Sarah Jane Smith. Again, the great pleasure of those episodes is the relationship between her and Tom Baker’s Doctor: I do love the Doctor’s tendency to say “Have you met Miss Smith? She’s my best friend.”

I use the term “relationship” advisedly. I am—as I noted when I said I was becoming a romantic in my old age—capable of becoming a ‘shipper if a show strikes me in the right way. But I’ve never been a Doctor Who ‘shipper . . . and, as an old-school, life-long fan, I found the rabidity with which Doctor/Rose ‘shippers attached themselves to the programme a little disturbing.

(Especially since I was, much as I hesitate to say it, not a big fan of Rose. Billie Piper was both gorgeous and adorable; I’m not arguing with that. But I found the relationship between her and the Doctor a little co-dependent, which didn’t appeal to me.)

But the friendship between Sarah and the Doctor I loved, and was thrilled beyond measure when Lis Sladen appeared in the new version—enough to even enjoy the ex-wife vs. new girlfriend vibe behind her interactions with Rose.

But Martha comes a solid third, and I suspect she always will. I was almost foaming at the mouth—metaphorically, I should say, to protect my fracturing reputation for sanity—when the Master was taunting the Doctor about the relative weakness of Martha compared to his earlier companions.

Oh, sure, Rose looked into the Time Vortex. That is pretty cool, and I’m not denigrating it—I’ve never done that.

But what Martha did in that three-part finale was phenomenal. Walking across the Earth? In a year? The only person to escape the burning of Japan? Bringing that passion, and intelligence, and energy to the saving of the human race? That took a fortitude and strength that Rose—no insult intended—was never required to display. Rose might have had it, but Martha displayed it, and I’m with Captain Jack: I’d trust Martha to the end of the world.

I want to avoid spoilers, and so I’m not going to say what I hope for from Martha. But I miss her.

One season is not nearly enough time to spend with my third-favourite companion. I’m sure you won’t be offended at your ranking, not considering who numbers one and two are.

And I suspect you’ll always be number three, Martha Jones. I wish you’d come back.