0081. Traditions.
[Of course he sounds preoccupied! He's so used to talking to himself, or to another physically present person, that he's nearly forgotten how to use this thing. The mutterings are accompanied by fumblings and tinkles and rustles and dings and bonks.]You know, it's escaped my mind often enough until Cissie brought it up earlier that Earth is very
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May I ask how your people celebrate, Doctor?
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On Gallifrey, we celebrate Otherstide not for a turn of season, but in honour of... one of our most esteemed historical figures. And it seems we do it simply to vex ourselves: we strew things about in a great mess and then dance on them, and if we haven't done it in a self-cleaning chamber, we spend weeks looking for all of it again. That's probably why I prefer Christmas, actually.
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Your Otherstide, though, sounds fascinating. That sound I heard was your strewing?
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It was, in fact. More popular variants of our language, as are most facets of our lives, are based on polygons, derivative numeric patterns, and ordering it all into shape: namely, circles. There are little discs in a range of colours that we place, preferably haphazardly, around the area of our festivities to remind us that even in chaos, motes of order and pattern exist and shape themselves accordingly, as was discovered by the founding fathers of Time Lord society.
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Ill-suited to the cold, yes, and in more ways than one. Firebenders draw much of their power from the sun, so that the outcome of a battle might be thrown were it to be fought on a short, cold day in midwinter. As a result, well...we tended to spend most winters waiting for them to be over.
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But I see. Any winter would be harsh in that sort of situation; I assume yours were the only powers with that limitation, or battle would have been quit at sundown. Were there events or celebrations in your life there that weren't somehow connected to war?
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Some, although the March of Civilization swallowed up our culture so completely that it touched all of our festivities. Long ago, we had celebrated the impassioned strength of our nation, and its unity with the other nations, and everything that we could offer to the world...by the time I was born, that had been forgotten. The only thing we celebrated was our superiority.
[He sounds sad about that, but then pauses for thought and perks up.]
There was one, though, that survived about intact. Our national flower - wait one moment -
[Thirty seconds later, he switches on the video function. He has a botanical book open to the camera, showing a painting of a single Fire Lily.]
These flowers blossomed for only a few weeks of the year, in late summer. The Fire Lily festivals were, I believe, the only times when nature was a thing to be honoured and celebrated. They were the only time it was thought of as safe, to draw inspiration from anything but
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Interesting... so your people found safety in something transient, yet symbolic. I wonder where the connection is... [He trails off a moment, lost in a private revelation, before he ends the train of thought with a faint "hmm" and continues.]
D'you think your folk, and the others of your world, will ever come to a higher ideal, and reach for the unity they once shared?
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I'd... I'd like to help.
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A man like yourself, I hope. D'you plan to go back there?
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...and I'm sure my nephew will be quite bewildered by how much I have missed him, after an absence he has no knowledge of.
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