Black Window

Looking at the array of creatures that turn up in Lungbarrow, from gullet grubs to fledershrews, blossom thieves to scrubblers and neversuch beetles, it feels like time for someone to write a Flora and Fauna of Outer Gallifrey. Natural history has always been one of my specialist subjects (see Ghost Light), and when I was about seven, I wrote to David Attenborough asking how I could go about being a zoo keeper. In those days, he presented the Zoo Quest series for the Beeb, exploring exotic locations in black and white and collecting animals for the London Zoo. He even wrote back to me outlining his path through university and the BBC. My career never really followed the Komodo dragon path, but over forty years later, the man is still one of my heroes. There should at least be a spaceship, even better a major planet, named Attenborough.

Meanwhile, we already know that there are cats and mice on Gallifrey, and tafelshrews first turned up in Time’s Crucible as laboratory specimens on board one of the first Gallifreyan timeships. In Paul Cornell’s Happy Endings, we learn that there is a Loom of Rassilon’s Mouse. But in The Invasion of Time, that load of couch potatoes, the capitol-bound Time Lords, are terrified of being cast out into the wilderness. Maybe it’s the centuries of urban living that make them uncomfortable with the uncontrollable wildness of nature. They’d rather watch it on a screen. We’re back to David Attenborough again. Even so, the remote Houses have orchards and formal gardens, presumably tended by the Drudges, and we know that the Doctor used to high-tail it up the mountain to visit Mount Lung’s local hermit.

I do like this image of looking up the chimney, staring up at a tiny disk of sky which must seem as remote as an unreachable planet.