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My face looks like an apple someone left on a warm windowsill for a year.
I no longer want to live in a metropolis that thinks it’s acceptable to charge fifteen quid for a cup of artisanal coffee that’s been passed through the digestive system of a tapir.
Twinings, the world’s oldest tea shop, took over Tom’s Coffee House in 1706. If you head down the tea-caddy-lined hall you’ll find a wooden box with the gold-painted initials ‘T.I.P.’ on it, standing for ‘To Improve Promptness’. If you wanted your beverage a bit faster you’d drop a few pence in, from which we get the word ‘tip’.
‘I shall trouble you no longer. By the way, I left a stool sample on your reception desk.’ ‘I didn’t ask you for one.’ ‘Think of it as a souvenir.’
The Thames was no longer obscured by wharves and ships but nor were there many signs of life. A wall of office blocks and empty apartments rose beyond the black waters like so many mirrored bathroom cabinets. London’s most spectacular views had been stolen away by people who never saw them.
Bryant continued to stab his phone until it emitted a sound like a baby trapped in a drainpipe.
Parliament housed rat-kings of ambitious power-seekers
the average household wealth for Britain’s richest decile is now three hundred and fifteen times that of the poorest, which means access across the divide has declined. The walls have gone up. It’s almost impossible to hold anyone at the top accountable these days.
Especially if he's named Boris Johnson
‘I thought you’d retired Barnacle Bill,’ said Bryant, sitting down alongside him. ‘That were just me messing about,’ Dudley explained, finishing his fag to the last strand of tobacco. ‘I told the children he’d died of woodworm just to get rid of them. I thought they’d never stop crying. He had a lingering death in Blackpool, I’ll bloody tell you that. We did the panto season there. It were bloody awful. Our Widow Twankey went to prison for molestation. How he got a job asking children to pull his bloomers down I’ll never know.’
Bryant wondered what kind of man would choose photos of office colleagues over family and friends. Perhaps nobody loved him. Good.
How’s the new blood?’ ‘They’re very nice, if you don’t mind interactifacing with generationally challenged pod people so young their mothers are still lactating.
People were never comfortable with police officers. The innocent worked so hard to make themselves appear guilty.
He felt much as Tom Jones must have done when he decided to stop dyeing his hair.
Did anyone ever tell you how lovely you look in the morning light?’ ‘No,’ she said suspiciously. ‘They never will.
‘Be careful not to confuse posh with rich, dear chap. The former are poor and the latter are vulgar.’
Bryant took the tobacco pouch from his top pocket and read it. ‘“Fort William Old Naval Bengali Hemp”. Yes, it’s a bit pungent, isn’t it? Says here it’s made with cardamom and marigold seeds but it smells like burning mice.
The spring rain looked soiled, as if it had already been recycled through several city drains.
‘Free expression brings out the worst in them. Their parents think they’ve given birth to baby geniuses. The truth is that most are uninteresting, a few have the electricity of curiosity in their eyes and the rest have the intelligence of molluscs. But in order to justify the cost of dumping them here everyone goes home with a gold star, a shiny badge or an important-looking certificate. They’re all right most of the time but occasionally I wish I could buy them guns.’
Ruth led the way through the rainbow-striped play area, stepping over a dozing romper-suited boy so smothered in red paint that he looked like an axe murderer’s victim.
‘There was a man of Newington, And he was wond’rous wise, He jumped into a quickset hedge, And scratched out both his eyes: But when he saw his eyes were out, With all his might and main, He jumped into another hedge, And scratched them in again.
I can say whatever I like because I have long since stopped caring what anyone thinks. I hope one day you discover the delightful sensation of not giving a monkey’s truss.’
‘Does it have a name?’ ‘Strangeways.’ She set the cat down on the floor. It promptly fell over. Strangeways was black and white and looked as if he’d been in a wind tunnel, and had quite a few clumps of fur missing and one eye partially shut. When Meera scuffed his half-chewed ear he started making a rasping noise like a baby with croup.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Bryant asked. ‘It’s got that squinty look on its face you only normally see on dead things, like it’s just returned from the grave. I don’t want another cat, especially one that looks like a zombie.’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something that looked like a hairy version of the facehugger from Alien scamper past. ‘Did I just see some kind of animal?’ ‘We’ve got a new cat,’
When our Prime Minister says something spectacularly stupid it distracts us from the real issue.
Pretty much every time the oaf opens his gob
He wore a voluminous Hawaiian shirt covered in tigers but was as thin as a sapling, with hair like a spaniel in a sports car.
She stopped a passing constable sporting the kind of weapons-grade acne that only afflicted the very young.
the prisoner would be given flowers and made to listen to another prayer before getting his neck stretched. He was led along Dead Man’s Walk through a series of white-brick doorways that became incrementally smaller and smaller, a rare example of an architect practising psychological torture prior to the building of the Shard.
In 1670 a couple of Quakers (one of them the future founder of Pennsylvania) were arrested for preaching, and the Old Bailey’s jury found them innocent. The judge refused to accept the verdict and locked the jurors away without food or water until they returned a guilty verdict. Instead of doing so they got a writ of habeas corpus issued, and established the right of juries to give verdicts according to their convictions. A big result for democracy. A few of our present-day leaders would do well remembering that.
The corporate stewards of Great Britain are not known for their fine grooming. Like old country houses far past their best they are usually in need of repointing and a damp course.
‘Your new pet just hissed at me. He looks like he’s been flattened in a mangle. What is he?’ ‘A cat.’ ‘He might have been in a former life. I meant his breed.’ ‘I don’t think he has one,’ said May without looking up. ‘He’s called Strangeways, apparently.’ ‘Yes, I think I’ve just seen a couple of them.’
‘There’s a couple next to me who are already rat-arsed. I don’t think he’s kissing her. It looks like he’s trying to fish her tongue out of her mouth with his teeth.
A few gravestones stood against a wall like the tabs on an old-fashioned cash register.
He has the mental agility of a beanbag.’
he struck me as a suppurating bunghole with all the allure of a hair on a toilet seat.
The powerless can only observe. That, I know now, is why social media remains so popular; it is the home of the powerless.
