I am not sure how it slipped under my sensor, but today I came across a documentary about Star trek fans called Trekkies. It is pretty interesting – there are quite a few very eccentric people on there, including one woman who insisted on wearing her star fleet uniform to court when she was doing jury service. There are also one or two very touching stories, such as one about how james Doohan prevented a woman from committing suicide.

But there is one thing which struck me especially, a coincidence which I need to record. I never knew this before, but the character Geordi LaForge was named in honour of a guy called Jordan Laforge, a star trek fan with Muscular Dystrophy who died in 1975. He wrote to gene Rodenberry, explaining that he attributed the fact that he had lived so much longer than he was forecast to, to the fact he watched star trek. Rodenberry decided to pay tribute to him by naming Geordie, a blind man who in the first few seasons piloted the Enterprise, after him. I cannot help but wonder whether Andrew Fox ever knew this. He had MD too, and back at school I remember talking about star trek for hours with him. He was a huge star trek fan – probably a bigger fan than I was at the time; it seemed to give him hope, to cheer him up. Who knows: maybe it inspired him to live longer too. I often think of Foxy, especially when I’m watching star trek. Part of m masters thesis is on star trek fandom, and indeed my own relationship with star trek, so Foxy gets a small mention. This fact therefore strikes me in a very weird, quite uncanny way: I was watching the documentary as sort of revision ahead of rewriting the corresponding chapter of my thesis, but it inadvertently took me back to the roots of my own fandom, back to the very reason why star trek means so much to me in the first place. This fact, minor to most people, therefore strikes me with great satisfaction: most of all it strikes me as oddly fitting, as if it completed a circle I never knew existed.