Peter-Bowman and Melissa had a wonderful honeymoon. They walked to the lake every day. Many hours passed in pleasant discussion of this and that. Peter-Bowman's ideas on the best glue to use when building a baby were often laughed at between them. Everything suddenly seemed amazing to Peter-Bowman. He was amazed that he had spent so much of his life living in a phone box and talking to stuffed toys. He was even more amazed that they had given him advice and that he had followed it. He was quite startled to discover that he had managed to get married.

Babies had of course had been discussed, but on the whole they had decided that it would be better to wait. Peter-Bowman planned to move out of his phone box in the near future, but as yet he hadn't quite over come his feelings that this would in some way be dishonest. He had always hated dishonesty above all things, no matter how much trouble it got him into. His Auntie Em had always taught him to be honest, and he was quite certain he would never achieve a work of life worthy of her memory if he started along the path to dishonesty now. Peter-Bowman was not really sure why he felt it would be dishonest to move out of his phone box. Melissa privately thought he was being a bit silly, but then she often thought that. It was one of the things she loved about him, his ability to look at the world from a completely different angle to everybody else. It may have been silly, but at least it made her laugh.

Melissa was in many ways the perfect wife for Peter-Bowman. It seems that his instincts had been absolutely correct when he first saw the Girl. Few other women would have put up with his habit of giggling uncontrollably when he saw French toast, for example. But then, Melissa had always found French toast to be inherently funny herself and so this was not really a problem. It did make people stare sometimes, but then Peter-Bowman would just stare back and before long the people themselves came to realise that when you got right down to it, French toast was pretty funny. They didn't even understand why, but went away from their encounter with the knowledge that really most things in the world were funny, if you let them be. It was only be expecting them not to be funny that you discovered that they weren't. Peter-Bowman expected everything to be funny, and he was never proved wrong. The funniest joke that Peter-Bowman knew was that he was married to Melissa. The very thought of it made him chuckle with pleasure for hours every day. It is a mark of the very fine person that Melissa was that she did not find this offensive, but in fact came to laugh just as often as Peter-Bowman did. They were very happy together.

There was a certain amount of friction, of course. Few marriages seem to get very far without it. They tend to lose traction and came off at the curves. Melissa really did want Peter-Bowman to move out of his phone box, and Peter-Bowman did really want to do so. It was just that he wasn't ready yet. He felt that there was something more to be done, some final reason for him to be in the phone box that he hadn't yet managed. Melissa accepted this, though she asked him most days if he was ready to move yet. After all, she had a perfectly good house that was just aching to have a perfectly good husband living in it, and Peter-Bowman seemed to be just the man to fill the role. Peter-Bowman was always very glad when he heard Melissa say this. She really did know exactly what to say to him. This is the reason that he became very sad when one day she vanished in front of his eyes.

It was a normal day in every respect apart from the fact that Melissa was about to disappear. Peter-Bowman was unaware of that fact as yet, and so he was contentedly watering the weeds outside the front of his phone box. After all, weeds need water too. Melissa had just popped into the phone box to make them both some tea, when suddenly there was a loud puff of smoke. Peter-Bowman immediately rushed into the phone box, but she had already vanished. He didn't know it, but when the paper from the scientist's clipboard had lodged in the back of the phone box, it had become part of the circuitry of the phone and accidentally discovered time travel. This is a rather common accident with phone boxes.

A standard phone box that has not had scientific diagrams melded with it can already distort time to quite an alarming degree. The time experienced by the person within the phone box making a phone call is disproportionate to the time experienced by the person standing outside the phone box waiting to make a call. Time always travels faster inside than outside any phone box placed in this position. The effect does of course require an observer. If there is only a person inside the phone box and nobody outside, then the time in both locations is seen to travel at the same rate. Probably the same is true if there is nobody inside the phone box using the phone and only somebody outside waiting to use the phone, but this aspect of the phenomenon has never been investigated. When you couple the localised time distortion effects created by a phone box in this manner with the further and far more puzzling effect that when a person is using the phone they exist simultaneously in two separate time streams - their own, and that of the person they are talking to - you can see that it's no surprise that many phone boxes are just temporal accidents waiting to happen when given the correct stimulus. Why, there's even a talking clock that you can call. In this case, the stimulus that activated Peter-Bowman's time travelling phone box for the first time, hurtling Melissa into next week, was Melissa herself. Out of habit she decided to spend the time whilst waiting for the kettle to boil testing the phone to make sure it was in order out of habit as a telephone company representative. She discovered that it was working exceptionally fast.

As yet, Peter-Bowman does not know that he now owns a time machine. He will discover it in the near future. If the thought of Peter-Bowman and Melissa being so cruelly separated in this manner upsets you at all, let this console you. Next week Peter-Bowman is sitting in his phone box wondering if he still knows how to talk to Garfields when Melissa suddenly appears in his lap out of thin air and makes him blissfully, blissfully happy all over again. I am afraid that this doesn't occur in our own particular time stream so that is as much as I can tell you about the event. Sorry. I do have to mention that it is at least possible that Melissa noticed the subtle modifications to the phone box that altered it into a time machine before she activated it. Who knows why people do things?