Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner.
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The Fire Brigade recognise only two kinds of people at a fire, victims and obstacles, and if you don’t want to be either it’s best to stay back.
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When you arrive unexpectedly at someone’s house you go in through the front door, often after making sure you’ve got a couple of mates waiting round the back. For a business, especially the kind that involves big trucks and heavy metal, it’s always better to go in through the back. The customer-facing part of any modern business is purposely designed to be as politely unhelpful as possible. If you go in from the rear, the customer-facing staff are all facing the wrong way and everybody starts their conversation on the back foot.
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Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do “paperwork” and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.
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But I wasn't some terrified peasant, I was an apprentice and I had been trained by the man who led the reguard at Ettersberg.
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At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.
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It’s strictly constables, sergeants, and lunatics. We’ll keep the kettle on for you.
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Don’t get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features.
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At the bottom of the box I found part of a map that had been ripped down its centrefold – a 1:40,000 scale depiction of a place called Ootacamund, which turned out on later research to be a British Hill Station in Tamil Nadu. A Hill Station being a place where colonial administrators and the like could use altitude to avoid the oppressive Indian summer heat, since the sensible solution, i.e. abandoning colonialism and moving back to Surrey, obviously never occurred to them.
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Because who is more oppressed. Those that seek nothing but entitlements for themselves or those that claim for everything, social security, housing benefit, disability and pay for nothing.
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The media are doing this, not because they have a sinister motive, but because they love to feel that they are influencing events. That's why they hate politicians so much, because politicians have direct power and they do not.
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My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.
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You know there's always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.
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It's a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.
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I had found the upper limit of my courage. Fortunately for me, there is no known lower limit to human stupidity.
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Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.
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When I was a kid I used to drink from the tap all the time. I'd run back into the flat all hot and sweaty from playing and didn't even bother putting it in a glass, just turned the tap on and stuck my mouth underneath it. If my mom caught me doing it she used to scold me, but my dad just said that I had to be careful. 'What if a fish jumped out?' he used to say. 'You'd swallow it before you knew it was there.' Dad was always saying stuff like that and it wasn't until I was seventeen that I realised it was because he was stoned all the time.
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Seawoll sat in the executive leather operator’s chair behind the desk wearing a dangerously stretched noddy suit that made him look like the Michelin Man’s slightly deflated older brother.
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I think you’re going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. Nightingale hesitated. ‘Quoting, mainly,’ he said. ‘And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority.
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Now, personally, I'd have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we're the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn't have one.
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It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, Street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden. Martin, who was none too sober himself, at first thought the body was that of one of the many celebrants who had chosen the Piazza as a convenient outdoor toilet and dormitory. Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body the "London once-over" - a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy or a human being in distress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport - like BASE jumping or crocodile wrestling. Martin, noting the good quality coat and shoes, had just pegged the body as a drunk when he noticed that it was in fact missing its head.
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So, actions were still being actioned and me and Guleed were actioning them, and the wheels of justice ground on. Albeit in first gear.
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This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.
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When you're a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don't want to know.