It happened when I was on the tube on the way back from a dinner one Saturday evening. I was leaning with my shoulder against the glass divider and unabashedly inspecting the cleavage of the brunette sitting opposite, whose low-cut, clingy dress left little to the imagination.
At the same time I was pointedly ignoring the disapproving glares coming from the old lady beside her. However, this was England. The old lady would rather have jumped with silent dignity off a cliff than have the mortifying conversation necessary to alert the young woman to my ogling.
As I watched, the young woman shifted slightly in her seat and folded her arms, causing her breasts to swell as they were pushed together and making her cleavage that much more enticing. I saw her long eyelashes flicker - had she noticed my gaze?
She was really something special, I thought, contemplating her sensual, half open lips. I would have to get her number. As I wondered what the best way was to make contact might be, there was a deep explosion somewhere ahead, and the train crashed.
At least, I assume that's what happened. I was luckily already leaning on the glass divider, but the force of the crash threw me off my feet and my cheek hit the glass hard. The passengers who had been sitting down weren't so lucky; they had been thrown into each other, onto the floor and into the walls and windows of the train. They slowly righted themselves from the dismal pile they had fallen into on the floor.
A businessman in his 30s was the first to his feet, brushing himself down and looking around in the dim light that was coming through the windows from the tunnel lighting (the lights onboard the train had gone out in the crash).
"What was that?" he asked in a voice that he was clearly trying to keep as casual as possible, though his pale face and wide eyes betrayed his actual anxiety.
"Haven't a clue," I said, getting to my feet. The young brunette pulled herself up onto the seat, her eyes open and earphones out.
"Sounded like some kind of explosion. I hope it's nothing serious," she said, trying to see through the windows what had happened.
"Terrorists, fucking terrorists, attacking us in our own country!" The old woman told us angrily, all inhibitions swept away by fear and anger. "It's lucky we're not all dead!"
It went on like this for a few minutes while we waited for someone to come and tell us what to do. However, no one came. "Someone should go and see what's going on!" pronounced the old woman, after we'd sat there for about 15 minutes. No one had so much as come into sight, although some ominously loud creaking sounds had come from further up the tunnel. "They might want us to walk back to the station."
She looked pointedly at me. I had been growing sick of her exclamations about the sorry state of the country, so I was in fact quite happy to oblige. Besides, I'd always wanted to use the emergency lever to open the train doors.
I looked back at them briefly as I stepped out of into the tunnel, and was gratified to see an anxious look on the face of the brunette as she watched me go. I wondered fleetingly why I was still thinking about that when there were clearly more pressing matters at hand.
Though carelessly braving danger is all very well in theory, when I realised I was alone in the coal black tunnel, I began regretting my decision. The train at least was familiar, enclosed, safe.
Out here everything was dirty, dark, unknown. The only sound came from the flickering lights, which buzzed and crackled intermittently. There was no going back now, however, and I pressed on, walking along beside the silent train in the direction of the front.
Strangely, after I got past our carriage, I found no one else in any of the other carriages. I reasoned that the other passengers must have been less patient, and had already found a way out.
I found a large side-tunnel leading off the train track that was presumably a way out, but no one answered when I shouted down it. I was about to move on when I spotted something glittering a few feet down the tunnel. I examined it, and discovered a strange, spade-shaped silver pedant, attached to a chain. I picked it up, thinking that it must belong to someone involved in the train crash.
I'd just slipped it in my pocket when I heard someone coming towards me from the front of the train. I looked up and saw a man walking briskly down the tunnel from the front of the train, which was still out of sight round the bend of the tunnel.
"What's going on?" I called out to the man as he approached. As he got closer I saw that he was perhaps 35 or 40 and wearing a strange suit with a bow tie. His confident stride and content, almost jovial expression jarred oddly with the situation we were in.
"Don't worry, I've sorted it all out, it's fine." he said, not breaking his stride as he walked past me and turned down the side-tunnel I'd just been shouting down.
"What d'you mean you've sorted it out??" I asked irritably, following after him. "What have you sorted out? Who are you?"
"I'm the Doctor," he told me, continuing down the dark tunnel. What kind of answer was that, I wondered. Was he some Sci-fi geek, or vigilante do-gooder?
"The Doctor, as in... Doctor Who?" I ventured tentatively. I hoped fervently he wasn't a deranged murderer. The question seemed to irritate him, but he didn't slow down.
"Yes," he said curtly. "Fucking BBC. Blew my cover for a whole 4 centuries here on Earth" He came to a halt and reached into his pocket.
Then I realised what we were standing in front of. I hadn't seen in the dark, but it was the TARDIS, exactly like the one on the TV show of Dr Who that I used to watch on BBC 1; the big blue police box that was in fact a physics-defying time-traveling capsule. There it was, shabby and inconspicuous as ever, and standing a few feet away from me.
My assessment of the situation promptly changed. This whole thing was a hoax, a "You've-been-framed" style trick that was being played on me, for reasons utterly unknown.
I smirked at the Doctor, showing him I knew what was going on. He seemed concerned with other things though, as he rapidly rifled through his pockets, of which he had a great number, his face drawn and anxious.
"You're fucking joking," he said eventually. "Lost the fucking key. You haven't seen a little silver thing anywhere along the tunnel have you?"
So that's what the game was. Might as well go along with it, I thought.
"Oh no, no idea what you're talking about," I told him with enough marked sarcasm to let the hidden cameras know that I was in on the joke. "Maybe you dropped it when you were sorting out whatever it was that needed sorting out."
"Must've done," he agreed. "What a joke." And he jogged back in the direction we'd come from, leaving me standing there by the TARDIS.
I took out what I knew must be the supposedly missing key, and went over to examine the door. Sure enough, there was a small lock the shape of the gadget I was holding, and when I pressed the key into the lock, the door clicked open.
Very smooth, I thought, though I wondered what the point of it all could be. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. And stared.
The inside was genuinely bigger than the outside. Just like it was meant to be. Except... this was real life. I went outside again to check that it wasn't a trick, walking once around the outside of the small box.
There was no hidden room behind it, there was nothing that could explain what I had just seen. The only explanation was that it wasn't a trick; it was the real thing. I went back inside. If seeing the considerable expanse of the inside of the TARDIS again wasn't enough to convince me, then the way that the machinery around me was firing up was.
