Snow and Ice is mostly a nice story about a spectacular evening entertainment on the frozen lake of Lord Patriclian’s manor. The Pazithi Gallifreya, the famous folk story and opera of Gallifrey becomes an ice dance performed under gravity globes in the open air. It sounds rather fabulous, doesn’t it? although Marion and Kristoph is amazingly popular among readers who enjoy this view of life on Gallifrey, I have had one or two people complaining that it doesn’t seem very like the planet we see on TV.

The trouble is, we’ve only ever seen a very narrow view of Gallifrey, mostly the judicial and political side of it. We heard a lot about the citadel and the capitol and the Panopticon, and we see High Councillors, Chancellery Guards, Castellan etc. But somewhere on Gallifrey there have to be people living ordinary lives, and that’s what I’ve tried to create in these stories.

We do have a couple of clues from later times. In the 1996 movie, The Doctor talks about lying in the grass with his father watching a meteor storm. The Tenth Doctor talks to The Master about the red grass of his father’s estates near Mount Perdition, and so on. Most of that bears out my idea of an aristocracy with great rural estates. And that being so, why not frozen lakes and ice ballets?

The idea that performing arts are the preserve of talented Caretakers patronised by the aristocracy seems about right for Gallifreyan society. It’s not far wrong for our world, really. Ballet dancers tend to be from middle class families these days, Billy Elliot types notwithstanding, but they still have a long way to go before they tub shoulders as equals with the moneyed elite of even British society. It makes perfect sense.

Of course, the happy scene is leading on to tragedy. Those readers who are up to date with Theta Sigma as well as Marion and Kristoph fully appreciate the irony that Madame Arpexia – Valena Arpexia – is accidentally responsible for Marion falling down the icy steps and hurting herself so badly that a premature labour begins.