Millie Gibson

            On Tuesday morning I didn’t hear the alarm and woke up at 5:22. My ears felt plugged so maybe that’s why the crowing of the electronic rooster didn’t make it through, and I’ll need to flush them out sometime today. 

            I worked out the chords for the intro of “La vie grise” (The Grey Life) by Boris Vian. 

            I didn’t have enough time to memorize the fifth verse of “Aux enfants de la chance” (To the Children of Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg. I just worked on re-remembering the verses I’d already memorized but had partly lost because I’d skipped working on them on Christmas day. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the last of what would normally have been four sessions in a row but I skipped it on Christmas. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a month.

            I spent at least an hour writing my review of Ant Man: Quantumania and was still far from finished at lunchtime. That’s the problem with these long movies. It takes so long to watch them that there is less time to write about them. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon it was raining lightly but I decided to see if I could ride to the African Drum store at 618 Dundas without getting wet to see if I could get the tonga drum repaired. But the place was closed. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:00. That’s the most I’ve weighed in the evening in nine days. 

            I worked on finishing my journal and was done just before dinner. I had a pork chop and a potato with gravy while watching the first story of the new Doctor Who series: "The Church on Ruby Road". 

            In the story a baby is left in front of a church on Ruby Road on Christmas Eve and is named Ruby. She is taken in as a foster child by Carla and her mother Cherry and eventually adopted. 

            Carla has fostered a total of 33 children. Ruby is now in her twenties and has begun experiencing accidents. But we see that little green hands are reaching out from hiding places and causing them. Ruby plays with a band in a dance club where the Doctor is tearing up the dance floor with his moves. She meets him when he suddenly steps up to catch a glass that she knocks over. 

            It’s Christmas Eve again and a new baby named Lulubelle is brought to Carla. Ruby is left with Lulu while Carla goes shopping. She hears strange laughter on the baby monitor and goes to the nursery in time to see someone carrying the baby up through the skylight. She follows to the roof where she sees the goblins taking the baby up a ladder hanging from the sky. She grabs the ladder and hangs on as it moves forward. The Doctor runs along the rooftops and jumps onto the ladder with her. He has gloves that help one climb effortlessly and gives her one. They ascend to the goblin ship that looks a lot like an old pirate ship. The Doctor figures out that the knots in the ropes that hold the ship together are a complicated technology and he learns to manipulate them to open doors like one would push buttons. Looking down to the lower deck through the floor they see Lulubelle on a conveyor belt advancing toward the mouth of the gigantic goblin king while the smaller goblins sing and dance to a goblin rock band that sings the praises of eating babies. The Doctor and Ruby fall down on the belt just before Lulu reaches the king’s mouth. The Doctor and Ruby start dancing and singing along with the goblin song as they are rescuing Lulu. They descend with her down the ladder and back to Ruby’s home. A few minutes later they hear goblin voices and a crack appears in the ceiling. When the Doctor looks for Ruby she is gone. When he asks where she is Carla has never heard of Ruby. The Doctor concludes that the goblins have gone back in time to take Ruby as a baby on Christmas Eve. He takes the Tardis to the moment when the mother, who we only see from the back, leaves Ruby in front of the church. Then he sees the goblins grab Ruby and climb the ladder. The Doctor puts on his special gloves and shifts them from light to heavy then he begins pulling the ladder down and the ship along with it. The king is about to eat Ruby when the ship is pulled down so that it is pierced through by the church steeple and the king is impaled. The ship dissolves and Ruby falls into the Doctor’s arms. He places her in front of the church and returns to the present where Ruby has been wondering what happened to him. After he leaves, Ruby begins to wonder about some things he said about meeting Houdini and about going back to save her. She goes after him and finds the police box. The door opens and she goes inside. The Tardis disappears. The neighbour Abdul is shocked while the other neighbour Mrs. Flood who is always sitting outside her home and watching, looks at the fourth wall and says, “Never seen a Tardis before” then winks. I assume we will learn more about Mrs. Flood as the series unfolds. Is she a former companion or maybe even a Timelord? 

            Ruby is played by Millie Gibson, who attended Oldham Theatre Workshop in Manchester where she was spotted by Scream Management and they began to represent her. Her first professional acting job was on the TV series Jamie Johnson and she became the star of the second and third seasons. She played Mia in the series Love Lies and Records. She played Lili in the series Butterfly. In 2019 she joined the cast of Coronation Street as Kelly Neelan. At the 2022 Soap Awards she won the award for best young actor.