RIP Elisabeth Sladen

I'm sure that just about all of you out there will have heard the sad news of the death of Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who. After the story I wrote as a tribute to Nicholas Courtney and the Brigadier, it seemed only right and fitting that I do the same for Sarah Jane. But, I could not bring myself to write "Sarah Jane's Funeral". Sorry, it just wasn't going to happen. So, here instead, is a short story about the amazing Sarah Jane Smith, who will never truly die.

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In Memory of Sarah Jane

Sarah Jane Smith was sat in her attic, kindly regarding a gift she had recently been left by a visiting Star Poet. The small, beautifully carved metallic item whispered out poetry in a sweet, sing-song voice. The poem depended on the mood of whoever was holding it, and so far it had only spoken words of joy.

Sarah Jane looked down at her watch – it was almost midnight. She should be off to bed, really. Luke was visiting and she had already forced him to get to sleep in his old room, leaving K9 to rest overnight in the living room. As the Star Poet’s gift finished another verse, Sarah Jane placed it gently back on top of her cluttered desk and got to her feet, stretching out her arms in a long yawn. She froze. Arms still outstretched, mouth still half open, she had heard something. From outside. At first it had sounded like nothing more than a gust of wind, but after all these years she couldn’t mistake it. She rushed to the window, throwing it open and looking down on the darkened garden. Sat there, visible by the light from its roof and windows, sat that ancient blue police box. The TARDIS.

Having slipped her boots on and run down her house’s many stairs, Sarah Jane burst through the back door into the garden. As soon as she had crossed the threshold, her pace slowed and she stood, staring in wonder at the time machine she had known for so long, unable to describe the warmth the sight of it brought to her.

With a rickety wooden sound, one of the doors swung open and the Doctor appeared in the doorway – he looked exactly the same as when Sarah had last seen him. She gave a silent sigh of relief at the fact he hadn’t had to suffer another death. She barely knew this Doctor yet.

“Doctor!” she beamed.

“Sarah! Hello! Fancy seeing you here!” he was grinning broadly as he stepped into the garden, closing the TARDIS door behind him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, running over to the Time Lord.

“Well, you know, just came to check up on you… in the middle of the night… Actually, if I’m honest, bit of a mistake. You know what the TARDIS is like. But, still, a sort of good mistake! I’ve ended up in much worse places!”

A happy laugh escaped Sarah’s mouth, as he listened to her old friend.

“Yes, you have!” she said with a smile. “Like Metebilis Three…”

“And Skaro…” he recalled quietly, his tone drifting somewhat as he reminisced of days long since gone.

“And Aberdeen.” Sarah Jane stated firmly, at which the Doctor looked around the garden, a little sheepishly.

“Ah, yes… erm, sorry, about that. Again.”

But Sarah was laughing, happy to see the Doctor again and to remember her past with him. And the Doctor was laughing happily with her, regarding his former companion with his kind emerald eyes.

“Master!” came the cry of a small, robotic voice. Sarah Jane looked back at the doorway, the Doctor’s gaze following hers and they both laid eyes on K9, trundling out of the house.

“K9! Hello!” the Doctor called out, his face fixed in a broad, beaming grin. He dashed over to the metal dog, laying his hand on the back of its box-like head, while looking over his shoulder at Sarah. “What’s he doing here? Is Luke visiting?”

“Yes, but he’s asleep at the minute. Maybe if you came back in the morning…”

“Nah, it’s alright. I’m sure I’ll bump into him at some other point. So, what have you been up to, protecting the world from your attic in Ealing?”

Letting out a long, happy sigh, Sarah took a seat on the bench, the Doctor slumping into the seat beside her.

“Same old busy life! Saw off a lone Slitheen last week, then helped a lost star fleet find its way home, had a visit from a Star Poet…”

“Ah! Star Poets! Lovely bunch. Visited their home world a few times – you would love it! They have towers carved from mountains of shining crystals and the queen’s palace is one of the greatest sights in the universe! I met four of their queens – and I may have accidentally married one.”

Sarah’s eyes drifted up towards the sky as the Doctor spoke, and she sat, gazing out into the vast ocean of glimmering stars. K9 slowly moved over to the bench where the two time travellers were sat, raising his head at the Doctor, who looked back down at his old dog.

“So, K9, how’s Luke been doing at uni? Working hard?”

“Master Luke’s work at university has been produced at his maximum capacity.”

Both the Doctor and Sarah Jane laughed at that. K9 had never quite grasped normal human speech, but that metal dog was a friend that had served them both well in the past. Looking back from his former pet to his former companion, the Doctor noticed Sarah’s gaze was still resting on the stars that shone down on them from the swirling darkness of the night sky.

“You’ve seen your fair share of them up close, I’d say.” the Doctor whispered, his attention now slowly being absorbed by the view of space.

“Yeah… funny, though, how rarely we just stop and admire the beauty of it. All of it. Space. The universe. Time.”

“Mmm.” The Doctor nodded his agreement. “It is beautiful. All of time and space – it’s just… incredible. But, sometimes, not as incredible as the wonders I find here on Earth. All those times, places… people. Like you, Sarah.”

Sarah Jane just smiled and whispered a quiet “Thank you.”

The Doctor tore his gaze away from the sky above, looking instead at his dear friend.

“I mean it, Sarah. All that time we spent travelling, and now this, all these years on, you’re still protecting the Earth, saving the human race, finding the best in people – very few people have quite the claim to greatness that you do. My Sarah Jane Smith, shining brighter than any star!”

A small smile remained on Sarah’s lips as she looked back into the Doctor’s eyes. She paused, speechless for a moment, before speaking again, slowly asking her friend a question she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to.

“All these years, doing what I do, doing what we did... sometimes, Doctor, sometimes I wonder – how many years do I have left? How much longer can I carry on?”

The Doctor smiled reassuringly, his green eyes twinkling like the stars as he spoke.

“Sarah. There are some things that can never end. No matter what the universe throws at you, no matter what happens, you will go on forever. In hundreds of thousands of years to come, people will still remember you. They’ll sing songs and tell stories of the noble and valiant Sarah Jane Smith, and how she was the perfect example of the best that humanity could ever be. Your work, your memory, your legacy will live on forever, Sarah, never ever forgotten. Life can come and go so quickly, but real life – that lasts forever. And, in centuries and millennia to come, people will be looking up to the stars and seeing a universe that is so much better than it once was, thanks to you, Sarah Jane.”

Sarah was sat with the echoes of tears shining in her eyes, a smile brushing over her lips. The Doctor returned her gaze in that funny way he had of being both sad and incredibly happy.

After taking one final look up at the stars, the Doctor got to his feet and walked back over to the TARDIS, opening the doors with a click of his fingers, and stepping inside.

Stopping on the threshold before he made another trip through time, he looked back into the garden, proudly regarding his friend.

“Goodbye, Sarah Jane.”

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Okay, sorry, couldn't resist that title! As you may know, if you are one of the very few people that pays attention to my ramblings over here, I've recently started working on a novel entitled "Changing". Yes, I have stuck with that title - it fits rather nicely, in more ways than one! And, as you won't know even if you have been mad enough to pay attention to the blog, I recently completely restarted it! Shock! Horror! Well, not really shock and horror, considering I was still in the early stages of writing it. But now, on draft 2, I've got a version I'm much happier with and is going, I feel, really rather well!

So what inspired my radical, insane moment of changing Changing (see what I did there)? Well, to be honest, it was another book. Wait! Don't sharpen your pitchforks just yet! I'm not copying or stealing ideas - I've just been given a bit of a wake-up slap! The book responsible is "Gone" by Michael Grant. The book begins with a teacher disappearing in the second sentence. It starts right at the moment everything goes wibbly! And so, I decided, I needed to do the same, because the book I was writing was just too boring before. It started with the main character having just cut his hand open, which is a little out of the ordinary, yes, but then it just felt too slow, too childish. It needed to start at the very point where normality says "Well, this is my stop!". So that's what I've done!

Before I delve any further into my writing, now that I've mentioned Michael Grant's Gone I'll have to talk about it briefly. It's about what happens when everyone in a Californian town over the age of 14 disappears. The town is cut off from the outside world by a barrier and some of the kids left behind start to develop strange, mutant powers. It is brilliantly, beautifully, perfectly written - there is some horrifically dark stuff in there and you can really empathise with the characters. But I'm not saying any more - go out, buy it, read it! It's an excellent book; especially if you're a teenager!

Now then, back to my stuff. I've been saying for a while now that I would post a preview of it, and to delay any longer might make me feel slightly a little bit bad. So, here is the opening to Changing, Chapter One:

An anguished yell burst from Drake Strider’s mouth as he woke, sitting bolt upright. Cold beads of sweat were trickling across his forehead and down his back. His breath had broken into heavy, trembling gasps and his heartbeat was fiercely evident against his ribs. Staring around the darkened room, he tried to find his clock, though his vision was blurred and desperately struggling to adjust to the darkness.

Pushing the tangled mess of bed sheets aside, Drake got to his feet, a little unsteadily. He brushed over his bleary eyes with the tips of his fingers and stumbled slightly, as he stepped towards the squat cupboard that sat in his room. An old analogue clock was stood on top of it and the teenager picked it up, squinting to make out the time. Three in the morning. With a slight groan, he placed the clock back where it had been standing and went to the window, pulling the curtain aside and peering out.

The sky was a vast, rolling ocean of darkness, a few stars just visible through the thick tides of clouds. A drizzle of rain obscured the street below, so that all that could be seen was the gentle glow of streetlamps. Drake stood still, watching, his thoughts starting to wonder in all sorts of directions as his gaze passed over the abandoned street. At least, he had thought it was abandoned.

Suddenly, something caught his eye. It was a figure, stood on the pavement below – a man, by the looks of it, and he was powerfully built. Drake stood, staring. The figure was remaining perfectly still, perched on the street corner, facing Drake’s house. A thought suddenly crossed the teenager’s mind. Is he looking at me?

A triumphant return!

To be precise, the return of my computer! Well, not exactly. I got a new one - but the important thing is it means I can get writing again, and gotten writing I have! Yes, 'Changing' is slowly but steadily getting going, there's been work on 'Consulting Detective' (work which largely involves me taking control of episode one from Adam!) and work on poetry. Yes, you read that correctly, I said poetry. What am I talking about? Poetry, not prose or stories? Have I gone insane? Well, stay right there and I'll explain everything for you, dear reader! It all started a few weeks back when, as part of my school's 'Big Read' week (which ended in an amazing 24-hour Readathon - I'll have to put up a post about it at some point), I was one the lucky people that got to attend a poetry reading and Q/A session, with a poet (whose name escapes me at the minute!), as well as a workshop session with him in the afternoon. Now, he was a really rather inspiring fellow and the whole poetry theme of the day reminded me of the recent school trip to 'GCSE Poetry Live' that I had attended. When we were there we heard from the truly amazing John Agard, as well as Simon Armitage. One of Armitage's poems, called "Kid" was based on the old 1960s Batman TV series, written from Robin's point of view. One of the things he had said in relation to the poem was that it was a way of showing that poems about heroic figures don't have to be written about ancient, mythical heroes and Gods, but can be about... well, whatever you want! So, I almost inevitably ended up writing poems about whatever I wanted - things that really interest me. I currently have two quite nice, light-hearted poems, one about Sherlock Holmes and one about the Daleks! I have recently, however, written one on a more serious issue that I really do have strong feelings about - soldiers and the army. More specifically, the "kill or be killed" mentality of soldiers, which I despise. Many of you might think I'm being ridiculous, and that way of thinking is fine, but one of the greatest and most inspirational people to have ever lived, in my opinion, was Mohandas Gandhi. Some of the quotes I have found from that one man show a greater wisdom than I think all the people of Earth today could ever manage. One of the best examples, which supports my point, comes from during WWII, when Gandhi said: "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions...If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." This is a belief and way of thinking that I honestly think we should all adopt and would make us all much greater people. The utter refusal to use weapons or to kill and to be willing to accept death instead of acting as though murder is acceptable. It is this way of thinking I am trying to promote through my most recent piece of writing. And that's one of the reasons I love writing so much. It's a way to spread your message, your feelings, your opinions through so many avenues of the imagination. Through new characters, or new worlds in stories and novels. Poetry, I find, allows you to directly give a message to your reader that they may not normally hear out - it allows you to give your argument with more power than simple, on-the-spot speech ever could. Writing spreads and contains your thoughts, keeping them alive forever. Long after you've left this life, your words can live on and continue to show your thoughts and emotions. That cannot be stopped by anything. And that, my dear reader, is truly why the keyboard is mightier than the machine gun.