Is the Fellow next to me at lunch a Time Lord?

I'm re-reading Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency. Chapter 3 has an excellent account of a high table dinner at a Cambridge college (here it is the fictional St. Cedd's, probably based on Adams' own college, St. John's) which I had not properly appreciated before, since I must have read it first when I was about 15 and a very long way from a Cambridge college high table. One of the fellows dining is the excellent Professor Urban Chroniotis, 'Reg', the Regius Professor of Chronology... It turns out that Reg is a Time Lord, and a refugee from a Doctor Who story.

Lots of fun. And, it has to be said, it has made me look a little differently at some of my colleagues. Perhaps those odd non sequiturs at lunch are not a sign of age or the sheer weight of learning. Perhaps it is just difficult to keep track of things when you're zooming back and forth across the space-time continuum. And no wonder people seem to have more time than I to get things done. If a deadline is looming, they just pop into a time machine and give themselves a but more leeway... Handy.