Choosing the design for new rugs and carpets, is actually a White House tradition. The incoming First Lady gets to choose the colour scheme of the carpet in the Oval Office. They don’t get to choose the pattern, of course. That would be the seal of the United States. Marion gets a bit more choice than the First Lady. She gets to choose the design for the carpets in Mount Lœng House.

She took a pencil and a piece of paper and tried to draw it, but it looked wrong. “No, I can’t go through life with a carpet that looks like a lob-sided pelican got squashed into it. Wait…”

What Marion was trying to draw, of course, was a liver bird. That was to represent her and where she came from.

“THIS is what I should like incorporated into the design for the main hall,” she told the carpet designer as she handed him a china mug. The designer looked at it for a few minutes then began to draw on a sheet of thick paper. A shield, with a stylised bird within, its wings outstretched and its head held high, and an olive branch in its beak. The mug was coloured in shades of golden yellow for the bird and russet-brown fading to deep red and in her mind’s eye she could see those colours in the new carpet. She watched as the designer put the two silvertrees of the House of Lœngbærrow around it and showed it to her for her final approval.

The mug, of course, would be a Liverpool Football Club one. The actual crest of Liverpool city isn’t in shades of red and yellow. This doesn’t mean that Marion is a Liverpool FC supporter, only that she bought a mug that represents her city. But I quite like the idea that the carpets in the home of a high aristocrat of Gallifrey has a design based on the liver bird of Liverpool.

Enter Marion’s first three named friends on Gallifrey, by the way, when she goes to lunch at Lady Lily’s. Isolatta Braxietel is married to Pól Braxietel, the current Castellan, head of the Chancellery Guard, the police force of Gallifrey. Hesthor Lundar is the wife of Bolar Lundar, the ‘Truth Taker’ who is a senior man of the Celestial Intervention Agency. Calliope Patriclian is the unmarried youngest daughter of Lord Patriclian. They are three young women of their race, though still hundreds of years older than Marion. But none of them have ever travelled much further than Gallifrey’s own solar system and they admire Marion for being so widely travelled with Kristoph. That is her way into conversations with them, being able to talk about her travels. But it is obvious that she is starting to feel at ease with these three.

The mention of the Sisterhood of Karn in this conversation is a seed for later stories which feature them. Lady Ravenswode, is also a seed, but she comes up in the next story. The little conversation about Lady Ravenswode being of Newblood birth, and therefore not as aristocratic as she would like to think, is an important detail before we go into a story about Lady Ravenswode’s snobbery.