All I ever wanted was all the Target books

The most I ever got invested in entering any kind of competition was the time the local publishers of Dr Who books had one, where the first prize was a complete collection of all the Target novelisations.

I was nine years old and I was hoovering up every single Doctor who book I could get, and I could only get hold of a fraction. I had memorised the Dalek Invasion of Earth by the time I was eight, and would haunt my first libraries, especially around the Terrence Dicks section.

And then there was a cheesy TV ad that promised a full collection of every book, and that was the greatest thing I'd ever heard. I couldn't even imagine having that much Who fiction all to myself. I'd be able to read any Doctor, in any era. There were already about 100 of the books released by then, which was everything in the world.

All you had to do was answer a few trivia questions. They were quite hard, especially when most of the series' history had aired before I was born at that stage, and then were never, ever repeated again (literally in the case of too many deleted episodes).

But you could get the answers in the second trivia book. When we went on holiday and visited the first ever shopping mall I ever remember, I spent the whopping $5 that I had built up in my school bank account on a copy of the book. It almost wiped my finances dry, but I did get a copy, and spent hours and hours going through it, looking for the answers to those questions.

When I got all the answers I needed, I sent them off, confident that those Target books would be mine, and I literally spent the next year coming home from school to utter disappointment because there wasn't a box of Doctor Who books waiting at the front door.

Eighteen months after I entered, I received a piece of mail with no return address, and inside was just a laminated badge with the Target books logo on it. I assume it was something to do with the competition, but never really had any explanation. I still don't, although I do still have that badge somewhere.

I never even came close to getting a complete collection, but I still have my first copy of the Dalek Invasion of Earth and a copy of the Visitation signed by the big man Peter Davison himself. My mate Kyle has them all now, and is already working on the next step of upgrading to ones where the spines aren't so faded. 

(After years of looking, I did get a full collection of Dr Who New Adventures published by Virgin in the 1990s - and am 44 books into reading the series in order - but that's an LTOGETHER different adventure in time and space.) 

Because while it's now years and years since I spent the long afternoon trying to confirm who was the Princess of TARDIS, I'm still the same nerd, and still disappointed when I get home and don't find a bloody big box of books on the front doorstep.