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I didn't think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.
Ben Aaronovitch -
The Metropolitan Police Service is still, despite what people think, a working-class organisation and as such rejects totally the notion of an officer class. That is why every newly minted constable, regardless of their educational background, has to spend a two-year probationary period as an ordinary plod on the streets. This is because nothing builds character like being abused, spat at and vomited by members of the public.
Ben Aaronovitch
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Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.’ Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought.
Ben Aaronovitch -
The media response to unusual weather is as ritualized and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: "I can't believe there's so much snow." Then anger: "Why can't I drive my car, why are the trains not running?" Then blame: "Why haven't the local authorities sanded the roads, where are the snowplows, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can't?" This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling moan, enlivened by occasional ILLEGALS ATE MY SNOWPLOW headlines from the *Daily Mail....*
Ben Aaronovitch -
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.
Ben Aaronovitch -
The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't.
Ben Aaronovitch -
When it’s still—when it’s the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it’s called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.
Ben Aaronovitch -
Sited a third of the way up Dartmouth Park Hill, it had obviously been designed by a keen admirer of Albert Speer, particularly his later work on the monumental fortifications of the Atlantic Wall.
Ben Aaronovitch
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Then Beverley Brook stepped onto the footplate and pointed a shotgun straight at the Queen’s head – I recognised the Purdey from my trunk. It was nice to see it getting an airing. Beverley herself was wearing an oversized leather jerkin and jeans. Her dreads had been tied into a plait down her back and a pair of antique leather and brass goggles were pushed up onto her brow. ‘Put your hands on your head,’ she said, ‘and step away from the boyfriend.’ The Queen hissed and gripped the rope harder.
Ben Aaronovitch -
Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
Ben Aaronovitch -
My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It's the best piece of advice he has ever given me, and probably the reason I was born.
Ben Aaronovitch -
This book is dedicated to all the people who get up and do something about it, whatever “it” is and however small the thing it is they do.
Ben Aaronovitch -
You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe.
Ben Aaronovitch -
It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding.
Ben Aaronovitch
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Back at the start of World War Two the authorities forbade the use of the Underground as an air raid shelter. Instead Londoners were supposed to rely on hastily built neighborhood shelters or on the famous Anderson shelters, which were basically rabbit hutches made from corrugated iron with some earth shoveled on top. Londoners being Londoners, the prohibition on using the Underground lasted right up until the first air raid warning, at which point the poorly educated but far from stupid populace of the capital did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison between the stopping power of ten meters of earth and concrete and a few centimeters of compost, and moved underground en masse. The authorities were appalled. They tried exhortation, persuasion, and the outright use of force, but the Londoners wouldn’t budge. In fact, they started to organize their own bedding and refreshment services.
Ben Aaronovitch -
The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.
Ben Aaronovitch -
The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead.
Ben Aaronovitch -
THE METROPOLITAN Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations. Not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught, or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers.
Ben Aaronovitch -
The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.
Ben Aaronovitch -
Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
Ben Aaronovitch
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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.
Ben Aaronovitch -
It’s not like me and Lesley are inconspicuous. Nightingale had winced, as he always does, at my incorrect use of the accusative pronoun but I think I’m beginning to wear him down.
Ben Aaronovitch -
He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn't know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name.
Ben Aaronovitch -
That’s because they don’t know. It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
Ben Aaronovitch