Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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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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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CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is, “Guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns.
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A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis, only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.
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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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Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis - he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with Crown ever since.
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To them, fae basically meant anyone who was vaguely magical who hadn’t gone to the right school, with the High Fae being the creatures referenced in medieval literature who dwelled in their own castles with a proper feudal set-up and an inexplicable need to marry virtuous Christian knights.
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I'd been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex, fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I'd like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time, and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.
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I left in a hurry before he could change his mind, but I want to make it clear that at no point did I break into a skip.
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He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.
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Gaston was a short, bulky man in his late fifties who favoured tight jeans, studded belts and sleeveless T-shirts, the better to show off the tattoos on his own arms. Only the absence of a mullet or a purple Mohican saved him from a breach of the EU directive against egregious cliché embodiment.
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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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I sighed and went back to my book, in which Morgoth nicked the eponymous jewels and had away with them back to Angbad. Sorry mate, I thought, not my jurisdiction. Did you have them insured? Whereupon Fëanor gets a crime number and a leaflet about being on guard against theft and the wiles of the personification of evil.
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The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.
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Peter Grant. Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.
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I wasn't sure I found that particularly reassuring, but in the event of an attack I wasn't going to be as much use as Thomas 'Oh sorry, was that your Tiger Tank?' Nightingale.
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Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension.
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The very rich, having fundamentally missed the point of urban living, have long been frustrated by the fact that it’s impossible to squeeze the amenities of a country mansion—car showroom, swimming pool, cinema, servants quarters etc.—into the floor space of your average London terrace. Those without access to trans-dimensional engineering, a key Time Lord discovery, have had to resort to extending their houses into the ground. Thus proving that all that stands between your average rich person and a career in Bond villainy is access to an extinct volcano.
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Sinister is Latin for 'left', making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education.
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By this point I was eager to emulate Guleed and merge unobtrusively with the imitation French farmhouse fittet cupboard and counter unit behind me.
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The rise and fall of Teresa Cornelys proves three things: that the wages of sin are high, that you should “just say no” to opera, and that it’s always wise to diversify your investment portfolio.
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I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police "first greeting". "Oi!" I said "What do you think you're doing?
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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.
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NOBODY LIKES a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead and dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil disturbance. From farmers with truckloads of manure to suburban anarchists on a weekend break and Saturday jihadists. What I suspect they didn’t have plans for was just over two thousand enraged opera lovers pouring out of the Royal Opera House and going on a mad rampage through Covent Garden.