Doctor Who knew it would take this long?

Completing a collection of something you've been trying to finish for decades is always a bit deflating. In the past few years I've managed some silly lifelong goals - including a full run of 2000ad - and have confirmed that the fun was always in the chase, not in the completion.

But there was no fucking way I was letting Human Nature go when I saw it on the local auction site.

The last few New Adventures starring the Doctor in the mid-90s were only available for a few short months before going out of print altogether, and they didn't have big print runs, as the kind of circulation entropy that is inevitable after 60+ novels in the series.

I was lucky to get most of the last few off the shelves as they came out, although had to later pay more than $50 each for Lungbarrow and the Dying Days, which go for much ,much more when I see them crop up.

I've had almost the whole series of New Adventures books for a while now - the only one I could never find was Paul Cornell's Human Nature. This was particularly frustrating since people in DWM kept calling it the best novel of the lot, and because it was the only one adapted into the 21st century TV show

Right up to last week, I was having a look over the Cs in the sci-fi sections at any bookshop I go to, just in case, although I fancied I had more chance of finding the Lovely Biscuits. I could have bought it from overseas, once I found one that didn't ask for huge postage costs, but it always felt like cheating.

But when it showed up on the NZ auction site, I had to have it, and got into a bidding war and paid way more for it than I should have. It was the first time I ever saw that book for sale there, in the 15+ years I'd been checking, so I wasn't going to get another chance anytime soon.

(I also got a couple of About Time books ,which I've been gagging to read since the early 2000s ,but were always $50 or somehting stupid when I ever saw them, so that's my summer reading sorted.)

They're all there now on the special bookshelf in the hallway, a complete collection. Woo hoo.

But it never really ends. I'm still after half a dozen of the Missing Adventures, a couple of the Bennie NAs, and plenty of the BBC Books which helped cement the Eighth Doctor as truly one of the great incarnations, even with his limited TV appearances, but just weren't the same. (All of the Faction Paradox stuff was absolutely fantastic, though.)

There is no interest in any novel published after the TV show came back in 2005.

But I was always about the New Adventures, which carried on Doctor Who when all seemed lost, and showed that the good Doctor and his companions could handle some more heavy thematic weight, that they could be smarter and funnier, and still unmistakably Who

I'm on a very slow re-read of the entire series which has been going on for literally years and have been stuck at White Darkness for quite some time - The Pit was weirdly easy to get through, considering how rubbish it was - but I need to pick it again. I won't have to time travel past anything in the series any more.