Free Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell

Yet. ‘What would you like me to do?’
    ‘There’s a café along the waterfront. Meet us there in ten minutes.’
    The Doctor sighed. ‘We’re in Darling Harbour, there’s barely an establishment here that isn’t a café.’
    ‘Coffee shop,’ said the male.
    ‘Field not narrowing,’ the Doctor replied. ‘What’s it called?’
    Neither of his new ‘friends’ had an answer for that.
    ‘It has green umbrellas outside,’ the male said eventually. ‘Ask for Jack.’
    The Doctor gritted his teeth. ‘Again. Darling Harbour. Sydney. Any idea how many people in any given café, even one with green umbrellas outside, will be called Jack?’
    At which point, something slammed into his upper back (probably a fist) and he went flying forward, crashing into the postcard spinner, and he fell flat on his face, bringing down a display of horrible pink and glitter T-shirts as well.
    Shoppers looked aghast as he tried to salvage dignity and get straight back up but realised someone had tied his shoelaces together. He staggered and fell again.
    Of his assailants, there was no sign and, by the time he’d freed his feet and grudgingly apologised to the storeowners, ten minutes was nearly past. He left the shop,ignoring the looks and tuts from his fellow customers and scanned both sides of Darling Harbour.
    Christmas. In the heat. It seemed wrong, the Doctor thought, that no matter where you went in the universe, Christmas was represented by red-jacketed Santas, reindeer and green pointy Christmas trees. Sydney, despite this being the height of summer, was no exception.
    The waterfront was decorated as if it were a bitter New York winter, or a savage Welsh one. Inflatable, jolly, fat, heavily-swathed-in-red-clothes Santas were clustered on a barge. The lampposts were wrapped in tinsel and snowflakes, whilst giant snowmen wobbled atop many buildings and one was suspended on the fascia of the Anzac Road Bridge. It just seemed wrong, bearing in mind Sydney probably saw enough snow in an average year to fill a teaspoon.
    The harbour was, as he’d said earlier, mostly a vast array of restaurants and bars and coffee shops on both sides of the water, developed in the last decade or so into one of the city’s main ‘must-see’ areas, supplying the handful of hotels in the area that charged a premium for a ‘water view’. He looked to his right. The humongous Pyrmont footbridge, to the right, the IMAX cinema and the Friendship Garden. He scanned all the storefronts, looking for one nearby that had green umbrellas.
    None of them. He went right, following the curve of the harbour round to the other side, trying not to get irritated with the slow-wandering pedestrians that always seemed to materialise in front of him when he was in a hurry.Why were there no set rules for walking? Cars had lanes. Bikes had lanes. Why not pedestrians? How much simpler the world(s) would be if pedestrians had to walk fast on the left and slower on the right. Maybe they could have a middle lane where they could drift in and stop and chat to friends. And thus stay out of his way.
    Mind you, this was a schizophrenic country that had one foot still in its colonial origins as a British discovery and the other in modern, fast-paced America. It was a weird amalgam of both cultures – Darling Harbour being a prime example. It used the British spelling of ‘harbour’ whilst adopting American spellings for words like ‘labor’. And don’t even get him started on their use of the word ‘thongs’, which had one meaning in Australia and a wholly different one throughout the rest of the entire universe.
    No wonder the people who lived there were so confused they couldn’t walk around a semi-circular harbour in a straightforward orderly fashion and stay out of his way!
    He was suddenly aware from the looks he was getting that this last set of thoughts had actually been said (well, OK, really rather yelled) out loud. A woman in a green bikini and her partner, a