Jiang Ailan had seen many things in her life – from the collapse of a dynasty to a communist revolution and everything in between. She had seen dictators rise and fall anew, had seen the entire world awash in blood as armies cut deadly swathes across the globe, had seen horrors and tragedies epic in their scale. She had seen her children grow and leave and return again with lines on their faces and grey in their hair. She had mastered over five hundred of her mother's recipes, and spoke eight dialects of three languages. She had lived in eleven and a half countries.
She was an old woman, and therefore felt entitled to some privileges – privileges like feigning deafness when she heard something she didn't want to hear and pairing orange slippers with a purple coat and a lime-green skirt. Privileges like opening her restaurant late and opening her mail even later, and then complaining when she missed a deadline. Privileges like knitting jumpers without head-holes and gloves without fingers and wearing them wherever she went. Privileges like attempting to pair her sons up with the nice girls next door despite the fact that they had been married for years and she doted on her grandchild, no matter how destructive and insane and spoiled they may be.
She was not used, therefore, to the unexpected.
This was the first time that a blue policebox had appeared on her doorstep and a madman had burst into her kitchen raving about aliens, and that meant that she regarded it with a certain degree of trepidation before she sighed and went to put on the kettle.