Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in March - round and about the 11th, in fact, though it matters little at this late stage - I was working down in London for a few days. It was part of one of the more interesting things I've been involved with at work recently - what was euphemistically termed a 'knowledge transfer project', but which amounted to a mass pillaging of the expertise and knowhow of a small team of programmers whose operation had been bought out by our parent company. The developers hadn't wanted to leave London; we hadn't been able to justify continuing to run a London operation; so it fell to me and a couple of colleagues to spend time down in London squeezing every last drop of knowledge out of them before they moved on. I also had a secret mission, known only to me, which was to have a good dig through all the code we'd bought and find anything we could usefully appropriate for use in other systems. Mainly, I was relishing the opportunity to have a dig through some substantial C# application code and see how someone else did it. What I wasn't relishing was completing my 'personal learning plan' forms - my PLPs - which I had to sign off to say I'd learned about the functioning of some aspect of the systems we'd inherited. We had to rate ourselves, from 1 (no idea), to 2 (some knowledge), 3 (competent) and 4 ("Champion!"). Obviously, you can't put 1 or 2; and no self respecting human being would rate themselves "Champion!". So, threes all round, I guess...
So, for a few weeks, I got to spend a few days working out of the office above Warren Street tube station, on the corner of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road. Spending lunchtimes marvelling at just how many branches of Micro Anvika there seem to be along the Tottenham Court Road, and evenings being indecisive in front of a wide range of restaurants in Soho, all made for a pleasant change. For the duration of my time in London, I managed to avoid using the tube at all, which gave me a different appreciation for London as a city than I'd ever had before on briefer visits. Normally, in the past, I've popped up from a tube station, explored a narrow area around it, then popped back down - seeing London as a series of disconnected bubbles. This time, ranging overground across the area from Euston over to Piccadilly, down to Leicester Square and back to Belgravia, I finally began to get a feel for how London fits together.
Anyway, this particular week, on Thursday, after a hard day's staring at C# listings and SQL queries, we're bushed. You know, in the same way that America has been...
We are three: myself (.NET architect, nitpicker, and secret code pirate), Dan (.NET developer, project lead) and Sam (.NET developer, project understudy). We've spent a day looking at other people's code, tracking down other people's bugs, and realising which other people's problems will soon become our own problems, and we're starting to tire.
Back to the hotel, then. This week, we've eschewed the convenience of the Euston Square Hotel - close to the office, but plagued by Euston Road traffic noise and the lights of the Euston tower (note to hoteliers: fit curtains!) - for the fading grandeur of the Berners Hotel, at its highly discounted LastMinute.com rates. The Berners, an old-fashioned hotel with a frighteningly baroque celinged lobby and bar, is a stone's throw from Oxford Street, placing it nicely within the comfort zone of an outsider like myself, whose mental London map is anchored on the roads whose names are familiar from the Monopoly board. Checked in, baggage deposited in room (via a once luxuriously-appointed, but now clearly aging elevator, whose origin can be dated by the faint mechanical complaints of a machine past its prime, and also the nowadays-anachronistic presence of an ashtray in the passenger compartment). We decide to set out on a food hunt, and a short walk in the direction of Great Portland Street finds us at an Italian restaurant offering Pizza al Forno di Legno, which suits me fine. Proper Italian thin crust pizza funghi and a share of a bottle of pinot grigio, and the curious variable naming conventions of Other People's Code are soon forgotten.
The bill comes, accompanied by a card carrying a quote from Time Out, suggesting that we have just enjoyed 'excellent food with real prices'. Spend a brief moment pondering the alternative to real prices, and decide that it is just as well that restaurant bills do not normally incorporate the square root of minus-one-pound. "Okay, so the bill is £12.99+4.99i, and there are three of us, but I didn't have a starter, so.. calculate the conjugate..."
Yes, at times, I'm still a maths geek. It's okay, I can handle it.
Anyway, the anecdote proper gets started when we leave the restaurant. At that point, I'm sure we crossed into the twilight zone. It became apparent just as we were walking down the street towards the hotel. In the background, a solo saxophone faded in. There was no obvious source for the sound. As we became aware that someone had started to provide our lives with a soundtrack, we noticed that we were stood in front of a boarded up shop with just the word 'Jazz' written across the whitewashed window. So, our evening was being set to a score, and it was (perhaps slightly worryingly) obviously film noir...
A little further along the road, the jazz sax still wafting through the city streets, and we're about to take the turn towards the hotel, when we notice a pub. Not just any pub - this is called 'The Champion'. We have to go in. Then we can put fours on our PLPs. It is fate.
It's a very strange pub. It appears stuck in a timewarp from the fifties - there isn't a recognisable brand name in sight. Even the soft drink fountain dispensers on the bar have some off-brand cola with letraset-1956 catalogue typography. The beers (bitter, IPA, porter...) all came from some obscure Kentish brewery; the lagers (pilsner, weizen, cloudy... take your pick) were all imported from the Germanic equivalent. All very... disconcerting.
We grab beers and a table to drink them at. The beer is good. Almost... too good... In the ashtray on the table is (at the risk of sounding like a Douglas Coupland narrator):
- The return half of a train ticket to Brighton
- A matchbook, featuring a nightclub logo, containing exactly two matches
- The partially burned cellophane wrapper from a CD bought in HMV, featuring half a barcode sticker, identifying the first five letters of the CD's artist
- Two cigarette butts, one with lipstick on it
It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. The jazz sax outside. The matchbook. The train ticket. These are clues. We've stepped into the opening act of a film, and we have a choice: we can take the hint, solve the clues, pursue a mystery that will probably reveal a grizzly murder, a stolen painting, and a conspiracy that reaches to the very highest levels of government. Or, we can drink up, go about our lives, and leave the narrative. What do we do?
We're still trying to comprehend when exactly we stepped over the boundary from reality into this fictional world, when suddenly Dan spots the explanation. He points out the person standing behind me. I turn, and suddenly everything fits. The timewarp pub; the film noir set-up... it all makes sense. Because behind me is The Doctor.
We've obviously walked into Doctor Who's local. It's probably actually a TARDIS whose chameleon circuits have enabled it to blend into this London street corner in disguise as a traditional London pub. If we follow up on the clues, we might get caught up in one of The Doctor's adventures, maybe even get invited to be his companions...
Or, perhaps not. Perhaps The Champion is just a darned good pub in Fitzrovia, that does a fine line in beer, and happens to attract the likes of Christopher Ecclestone as a customer. I don't know. But I do know that the next morning, over breakfast in the Berners' gilt-encrusted ballroom-cum-dining hall, for some reason the familiar radiophonic sounds of the Doctor Who theme was playing over the sound system...