Miriam-Teak Lee

            On Thursday morning I got to bed after 2:00 because I’d dozed off earlier in front of the computer. I didn’t get to sleep until after 3:00 but still got up at 5:00 as usual. 

            I ran through singing and playing my translation of “A tous les enfants” (To All the Children) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication. 

            I worked out the chords for the chorus and half the first verse of “Johnsyne et Kossigone” by Serge Gainsbourg. I’ll finish that tomorrow and then I think everything will just be repetition. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice at the lowest volume for it to still sound like an electric guitar. I didn’t hear any complaints from Benji. He’s been waiting for housing in a care facility because he can’t handle the stairs anymore, so I’m hoping he either gets it or dies soon. 

            I weighed 87.45 kilos before breakfast. 

            At about 11:50 I left for Yonge and St. Clair but stopped at Long and McQuade at Ossington and Bloor to pee just to be safe. I had to pee again long before I got to Top Cuts but managed to hold it. Amy only had one customer ahead of me and she was halfway done when I got there. 

            I had a date to meet Brian Haddon at the Crown and Dragon on Yonge north of Davenport and was done at Top Cuts at around 13:15, so when I got to the Crown and Dragon I was half an hour early. I waited outside, sometimes sitting on a planter with no tree planted. I was in front of The Dalton School, which serves Junior Kindergarten to Grade 8. I was curious because it didn’t look like a Toronto District School Board school, so I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the curriculum is English-Mandarin. 

            Brian got there at around 14:10. The Crown and Dragon is famous for its dragon wings and I asked the waiter if the dragons are Canadian. He said they are and come from Durham, Ontario. There is a special on Thursdays featuring two kilos of wings for the price of one and a half kilos so I went with that, with half of them Buffalo butter and the other half dragon’s breath and an order of fries. Brian had half a kilo of Buffalo butter dragon wings and an order of fries, but I shared some of my dragon’s breath wings with him as well. I took about half a kilo of the dragon’s breath wings home with me. I learned Brian took up juggling about ten years ago. I vaguely remember him mentioning it before. He’s up to four balls now. We agreed to get together in about a month perhaps at The T.O. Lounge in Parkdale near me. 

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco where only two bags of red grapes were firm enough to bother buying. I also got a pack of raspberries, some bananas, a box of spoon size shredded wheat, a pack of Genoa salami, and two packs of Full City Dark coffee. I did a price match on the grapes to Walmart’s much cheaper price of $5.38 a kilo.

            It was already 18:30 when I got home and even though it was late I felt I needed to take a siesta. I slept from 18:45 to 20:10 and it was already past time to make supper. 

            I weighed 87.15 kilos at 20:15. 

            I had a potato with gravy and my last three pork ribs while watching episode 6 of the most recent season of Doctor Who. 

            It’s 2995 and the night of 803rd annual Interstellar Song Contest on the Harmony Space Station. The host for all of those years has been Rylan Clark, who always goes back into cryogenic suspension after the show until the next one. The Tardis appears in one of the glass VIP booths and the Doctor steps out to take a Vindicator reading as he continues to try to edge his way back to delivering Belinda Chandra back to London on May 24, 2025. He and Belinda see where they are they decide to stay to watch the show. The Doctor tells Belinda he was at Eurovision in 1974 when Abba won and Olivia Newton John came fourth. After the Vindicator has taken its reading we see that Mrs. Flood is watching from the audience through her opera glasses. She says to herself, “Vindicator ready and primed. That’s the final link!” Then she sits back to watch the show. The drones that are supposed to guard the production room announce “Phase one activated” and then a hellion named Kid enters the room. He has taken control of the drones and they draw their guns. Wynn, one of the technicians turns out to be Kid’s lover and she has helped him take over. Phase 2 begins and Wynn causes the interstellar broadcast to be of the previously recorded dress rehearsal. She says no one will know the difference. But the Doctor sees that the broadcast is different from the live show. The first singer begins. Kid opens the protective dome over the space station and the audience is sucked up from the arena and into space, including the Doctor and the Tardis. Wynn secretly saves one of the contestants by keeping her section locked down. Belinda is protected while still in the viewing booth but she sees what has happened and feels devastatingly alone. The director calls Kid and Wynn monsters. He asks, “Is it the horns?” As a Hellion he is a member of the most looked down upon race in the galaxy and he says he is just doing what everyone expects of a Hellion. The drones deliver a box called a Delta Wave to Kid. Belinda leaves the booth and meets Cora, the singer who Wynn saved, and her songwriting partner Len, who tell her that they are locked in backstage. Len tells her Hellions have taken over the station and that Hellions are rumoured to be cannibals. Cora tells him he shouldn’t spread rumours about people he doesn’t understand. Meanwhile the Doctor is floating in space as his body slowly freezes. Suddenly he has a vision of his granddaughter Susan (played by the original actor, Carol Ann Ford, who was in the very first Doctor Who episode in November 1963). She looks like she’s in a Tardis as she tells him, “Go back! Find me!” With renewed strength he grabs a confetti shooting canister that’s floating in space, aims it away from the station and fires to propel himself towards an airlock. Married couple Gary and Mike, see him through the window and run to open the airlock. The Doctor makes it in and then collapses. Mike is a nurse and he grabs medical it from the wall. He shoots adrenaline into the Doctor’s hearts and revives him. The Doctor says the people floating above are not dead because when he first saw the dome opening he made an adjustment that increased the mavity to they are still close to the station and in mavatic suspension. Their life signs are suspended but they can be revived. The Doctor thinks Belinda is also up there. He tries to tap into the computer system but gets hit by a sonic delta wave that almost incapacitates him but he grabs his sonic screwdriver and disables it. The Doctor says when they transmit the signal it will kill all three-trillion viewers of the contest. Gary is a technician who worked on the song contest tech design. He causes a hologram of Graham Norton to appear. The Doctor tries to hack into the system and Kid confronts him on video. Belinda sees the video on a screen where she is and is relieved that the Doctor is alive. The Doctor tells Kid he'll stop him. Kid says if he approaches the gallery he’ll purge the airlocks. The Doctor promises to survive and find him. He tells him he has put ice in his heart and he will throw his body into the void and let him freeze to death. Belinda is surprised because it’s not like the Doctor. Kid sends the drones to kill the Doctor. Cora says she knows Wynn and Kid and admits that she is also a Hellion. She lifts her hair to show where her horns were cut off. The corporation bought her planet to harvest poppy honey. Kid is attacking the contest because the corporation sponsors it. The Doctor is rewiring a computer as two drones come up behind him. Without seeing them and without stopping working he grabs his sonic, points it behind him and causes the drones’ heads to explode. Belinda convinces Cora to try to get the gallery and talk to Wynn and Kid. Len can hack the elevator but he is now reluctant to help her after learning she’s a Hellion. He says he’ll help but after that they are done. The Doctor arrives in the gallery when the Delta Wave is 99% ready to transmit. He tells Kid, “When I tell you to stop, you really should stop!” he tells Kid he knows people like him and also knows that his motivation of revenge is a lie because he’s really just a killer. Kid shoots the Doctor but he is only a hologram. The real Doctor is near the Delta Wave and destroys it. Then he destroys Kid’s gun. The Doctor’s puts on a glove that converts his holograms to hard light. One appears behind Kid, then touches and electrocutes him repeatedly, suggesting he should do it for every life he’d planned to end. Susan appears in his head and tells him to stop and says, “Grandfather!” he doesn’t stop until Belinda arrives and his relief changes his mood. Kid and Wynn are arrested. There are still 100,000 people floating in the mavity shell. The Doctor suddenly gets an idea. Gary is an expert in hard light holograms. He gets him to fashion a tractor beam to pull the people back down. Gary modifies the same glove the Doctor wore and begins pulling people back down. Mike turns Rylan’s cryogenic chamber into a revival booth for each of the frozen people pull back to the station. The audience returns to their seats. Rylan says that years contest is done but he wants everyone to hear one song by Cora. She announces that she is Hellion and there are some negative shouts but she sings her song in the Hellion language and it wins them over. The Tardis is retrieved. Belinda tells the Doctor he scared her and he says he scared himself but the near death of three trillion people triggered him because it made him think of the destruction of his home planet Gallifrey. Before they enter the Tardis, Graham Norton’s hologram appears to say the Earth died in a single second on May 24, 2025. They return to the Tardis and now the Vindicator has all the readings it needs to return to Earth on May 24, 2025. But suddenly alarms go off and the doors of the Tardis explode. 

            The last person brought back to the station and unfrozen is Mrs. Floor. She says her double brain stem froze, which is lethal for a Time Lady. She says “The battle begins” and then starts to regenerate but just as the Doctor did last time she bi-regenerates. Mrs. Flood was the Rani. The new Rani says Mrs. Flood is now only a Rani while she is “the” Rani. Mrs. Flood automatically becomes subservient to the new Rani and calls her “Ma’am”. The Rani says she’ll bring the Doctor absolute terror and the two Ranis leave.  

            Cora was played by Miriam-Teak Lee, who with her brother Dex attended the Latymer School where they were dance partners. She made her London stage debut in On the Town. She made her West End stage debut in the original London production of Hamilton. She starred in the jukebox musical & Juliet for which she won the Laurence Olivier Award. She co-starred in My Bloody Galentine.