Next gig: The Tournament on the 25th January 2010.

As I stood amongst them all, bored and confused, something made me look up. There between the shifting mass of faces I suddenly saw, looking right back at me, him.

It wasn’t my Doctor; not the one I’d grown up with, nor a face familiar in a dream only to become a stranger again when you wake. This was the, until very recently, current Doctor; The Tenth Doctor. But it was him all the same. The Doctor, champion of my childhood and all the wild stories, unrefined memories and feelings associated with being a child, staring back at me with an intensity both frightening and yet somehow sad.

I smiled weakly. It was cold. With nowhere else to go I made my way back into the autistic hug of strangers. The door closed behind me.

I woke up.

***

Years later I am on a bus, late for work as usual.

Fed up with staring down at another inexplicable Regent’s Street traffic jam, I follow the woman seated in front of me from the top deck of the Number 6 and off into the street, resigned to walk the rest of the way to Holborn – just a mini act of rebellion for a Thursday. It’s cold and I pull my Camden-relic navy officer’s coat about me as I cross Shaftesbury Avenue, through Piccadilly Circus and on to Leicester Square.

A sickly yellow on red totem of corporate trash catches my eye, and suddenly I realise that there is nothing I want more at this precise moment than the capitalist taste of a McDonald’s Egg and Bacon McMuffin™. I walk in under the neon plastic arches, share a joke at my incompetence with loose change at this hour of the morning with the young woman at the till, and am soon marching on across Leicester Square, munching on my Egg and Bacon McMuffin™ and wishing my hair didn’t have to resemble Hyacinth Bucket’s when the wind blew.

‘Not a bad city after all,’ I muse as I eat my junk food and walk through an impossibly, blissfully deserted Leicester Square at 9:41am. I even consider leaving the house that little bit earlier in future so I can take this walk more often. It’s that odd sort of morning where you take an interest in everyone around you as they pass by, rather than keep your head down and push on through the crowds just to get where you’re going. I notice one man in particular as he approaches me – nicely tanned like he’s just returned from holiday, and idly wonder where he could be headed. He looks weirdly familiar somehow, and I feel as if I should know him. It happens all the time in London – a huge city where you can bump into people you know in the most unlikely or stupendously obvious of places. The closer I get, the more certain I become that I do know him.

I stop, mid-chew.

It’s David Tennant.

It’s the Tenth Doctor.

He glances at me and just as quickly looks away. Instantly, (even as my brain tries to understand why David Tennant is in Leicester Square, in front of me and not on a television screen in my flat) I feel invasive, and realise he must encounter this sort of reaction all the time.

Suddenly I am aware my mouth is open, and decide that he’s probably more confused as to why a man in an ill-fitting retro navy overcoat with hair like Hyacinth Bucket is showing him the half-chewed contents of his mouth for no apparent reason. Surely he doesn’t encounter that all the time.

His pace quickens. Something in me that realises that this moment is imminently about to become one of those memories known to people called Ben Leto as “a regret”, and my feet and mouth launch a devastating coup against my brain, still entirely unable to grasp the basic concept of chewing. Everything that follows I remember perfectly, but as if I watched it as someone else:

Ben remembers how to swallow, steps carefully forward and somehow manages to say “I’m sorry, but… David…?” David Tennant smiles a broad grin and stops his acceleration away from the mad apparition of Patricia Routledge with stubble, turning instead to face it. Ben extends his hand.

“I just want to say… thank you. Thank you so much,” Ben says, somehow.

David grasps his hand and shakes it warmly. His smile grows. “No,” he replies, with no trace of his natural accent. It’s The Doctor’s voice. “Thank you.”

Ben smiles in return and begins to walk slowly backwards. David Tennant nods his broad smile and resumes his march towards Piccadilly Circus. Suddenly he turns around, walking backwards as he watches Ben similarly backing away.

“Wow,” Ben says.

David Tennant laughs. Both of them turn back to their original paths and continue their different journies.

Half an hour later, I arrive at work, alternating between wide-eyed, open-mouthed and staring into space and giggling like a dizzy seven year old boy, with next to no memory of how I got there. I’m not usually phased by celebrities, even when they’re personal heroes (though some certainly are phased by me).

But I didn’t meet David Tennant.

The seven year old in my head who dreams and makes up silly stories keeps insisting I met the Doctor.

]]> http://benleto.com/blog/1248/death-of-the-novelist-3/feed/ 3 http://benleto.com/blog/1241/death-of-the-novelist-2/ http://benleto.com/blog/1241/death-of-the-novelist-2/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:32:42 +0000 Ben http://benleto.com/blog/?p=1241 One day, someone might even ask why I stopped.

I’ll reply that I found all the people I wanted to share the world I saw with.

It almost makes me look back through rose-tinted specs at ‘Dear ……………………….’; a form of address which always perplexed me more than a little. I mean, if you’re going to be made to feel utterly ephemeral to the person taking 10 seconds to read a synopsis it took you a week to compile about the novel it took you years to write, there’s no better way to do it than by receiving a template form with space for your name, and discovering they’re so uninterested in your submission that they haven’t even scrawled your name into the aforementioned space:

‘Your insipid ink-dribblings offend me so much I’m not even going to pretend you’re an autonomous being: Dear intangible concept so offensive to me that you do not even merit acknowledgement of your very existence, go away.’ *

This new no-frills approach however makes me feel like a sort of literary Jehovah’s Witness. Imagine if the tables were turned, and it was considered acceptable for authors to write prospective letters in the same way:

* Anyone who’s never received a rejection letter/note/word from a literary agent may wish to listen to this. It may help you to understand why many authors have no friends and hate everyone. And never get published.

I marked up a candidate’s exam paper today when one mark wasn’t clear. Perhaps it was Question 22. I don’t remember. As soon as I did it I had a vivid fantasy about a life-saving operation I will undergo in about 30 years at the hands of a surgeon who once almost failed a critical exam if it wasn’t for one mark. It wouldn’t surprise me if it came to be. Impossible things lie in each and every corner these days.

The room where the exams take place is one of the college’s museums – a collection of internal organs, limbs and body parts forever preserved for trainee surgeons, visitors and temps such as myself to gawp at and possibly consider the nature of dignity of one made immortal in a plastic casket; a tide of formaldehyde sweeping back time to keep them forever close to their moment of death. An old lady – an actress playing a patient in one of the assessments and still in her red and white dressing gown – moves from exhibit to exhibit, regarding them and commenting as she does, either half to me or entirely to herself. “They are grotesque,” she says, “but I also find them comforting. The capillaries in our body look no different from those in a leaf or the roots from a tree. It reminds me that everything in the universe is connected. And I think that’s beautiful.”

I’ve started hearing music – a cacophony of clashing, incompatible noises and sounds that have only now started to slow or speed up, occasionally intertwining to become a melody or a beat. A simple sound that is beautiful by its very simplicity. Life plays on in endless Variations. I see these Variations every morning I leave the house, these beautiful things inconspicuous by their plain sight: traffic slowing to let an ambulance pass; two people who once had the improbability to meet and are now holding hands; sunlight within huge mountains and cities made of cloud reflected in a tall glass building, manmade. What is my chord? What key is my brain thinking in? What door does it want to unlock? What is behind door 22?

A cautionary tale for adult persons as to why one should not accept denominationally unstable wishes from strange fairies in forests. Written and scrawled by yours truly and read by John Rayment.