I must be one of the very few
people to welcome DWM’s lately reduced wordcount: it allows me to manage almost
half of the articles each month. I’m also grateful for the four-month gaps
between blu ray box sets and the yearly ones between steelbooks. As for actual
books, it’s taken three months to manage 46 pages of Scratchman.
My Big Finish intake was in
danger of becoming an impossibility, but I’ve cunningly devised a plan with several
non-Who bonuses to boot, meaning I can get in over 30 hours of listening per
month. I work in a school precisely four miles from my house. It’s an unforgivably
long 50-minute bus journey away and it costs £17 a week. Recently, I got myself
an android phone. (I’d previously settled with a Neanderthalic Alcatel with
push-buttons and everything.) This meant that I was able to listen to Big Finish
downloads if I so wished whilst on the move. Now, a four-mile walk to work takes
precisely one hour and a Big Finish CD – sans extras – usually lasts precisely
one hour, meaning I can now manage two discs a day whilst travelling to work
whilst saving £17 a week whilst losing 2lbs of stomach. Frankly, it’s a triple
win.
Before the walking-to-work Masterplan, I had to wait for my daughter’s
evening sleep to coincide with my wife’s soap operas, during which I could pull
out the headphones and get 25 minutes in. This happened rarely, however, and the
backlog was becoming extraordinary. When my daughter’s evening sleep disappeared
from her routine entirely, Big Finish listening became all but unfathomable. The
walk to work has meant that not only am I managing the latest releases as they
arrive but I’m ploughing through Jago
& Litefoot and Counter-Measures
too. As fans, whatever the circumstances, we can always find a way to make it
work!
I’m fully aware that this does indeed
appear to be the behaviour of an obsessive with a warped sense of priority but
then I think of football fans. The seasoned professional fan spends every
Saturday out either at the ground or in a pub. Subscriptions to BT Sport or Sky
are paid for monthly and season tickets are paid for in fell swoops at the
start of a season. Big games, European or World Cup matches are an added expense,
alongside football kits, memorabilia and programmes. This is the behaviour of
so-called “normal” people, celebrated by “the lads” but - probably as a result of
the guilt-ridden Doctor Who-less 1990s – I wonder if I’m not a little
over-reflective about the way I spend my money. Taking into account how much a
football fan might spend, a Big Finish subscription, a DWM and a blu ray every few
months doesn’t seem all that bad. And I'd only be spending £17 a week on the bus.
What I am sure of, however, is that
even though I can bring the Doctor to mind and raise a smile whenever I wish and
even though he’s been around for longer than I can remember, I know that when I
think of my daughter or my wife or my step-girls, I can feel my heart leap. And
I know that if they ever need anything, that Tom Baker blu ray could fetch a few
hundred quid, as would that Capaldi steelbook or that 1965 annual or The Well-Mannered War. And I know as
well that they’d be the last people to suggest I sell them: my wonderful girls. When they’re all grown up and
left us, my wife can watch her soaps in peace and I might finally start reading
my Complete History, the 30th birthday present it took her four years to buy for me.
JH
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