A Nice Time is a corny title, isn’t it! Sorry, couldn’t resist it. There are two main reasons for setting a story in Nice on the Côte d'Azur. Firstly, the project I did on the perfume industry of Nice was the only part of school French lessons that didn’t bore me. Secondly, I needed a good setting for Marion to discover that Time Lords secrete sugar as well as salt in their perspiration and that kissing their skin is a pleasantly sweet sensation. Somewhere that they could both be warm and lightly perspiring was called for.

This idea of Time Lord’s tasting of honey goes back to when I was writing the Unfinished Business stories and found some possibly apocryphal information about Time Lord physiology. The secretion of sugar in their perspiration was supposedly one of the differences as well as their two hearts and respiratory by-pass and other such qualities. I can’t even remember where it came from at this point, but it does make for romantic interludes when Time Lords get cuddly with Human women. Personally, I think it would make them a little sticky as if they’d been bathing in candy floss, and I can’t help wondering if Time Lords are prone to diabetes. But it’s an interesting little detail and it can be slipped into most of my Doctor Who franchise stories.

Of course, the overriding theme of this story was the fact that Marion is gaining confidence in Kristoph’s presence. It was noted at the start of the story by fellow student, Sally, and by the end, when she is kissing her lover in uninhibited ways on the beach at Nice, she has made a real transition from the shy, uncertain woman she started out as.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promenade_des_Anglais