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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.
Inside, the mortuary was much the same as the rest of the hospital, only with fewer people complaining about the state of the NHS.
Book of Lies,
Once they start to think about the consequences they almost always calm down – unless they’re drunk of course, or stoned, or aged between fourteen and twenty-one, or Glaswegian.
the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop.
until your actual fully accredited member of the BMA says it’s dead, it occupies, bureaucratically speaking, an indeterminate state just like an electron, an atomic cat-in-a-box, and my authority to conduct what was tantamount to a murder investigation on my own recognisance.
The police can live with looking corrupt, bullying or tyrannical, but looking stupid is intolerable.
‘I didn’t know he was a guy until we got back to the room,’ he said. ‘And I was having such a good time I thought, why not?’
When all the map was pink, I thought. When every boy expected his own adventure and girls had not yet been invented.
‘You can’t call them black magicians,’ I said. ‘You realise that we’re using “black” in its metaphorical sense here,’ said Nightingale. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Words change what they mean, don’t they? Some people would call me a black magician.’ ‘You’re not a magician,’ he said. ‘You’re barely even an apprentice.’ ‘You’re changing the subject,’ I said. ‘What should we call them?’ he asked patiently. ‘Ethically challenged magical practitioners,’ I said.
The Corporation of London, the organisation dedicated to ensuring that the City, the financial bit of London, is untainted by all this newfangled democracy that’s been rearing its ugly head in the last two hundred years or so. If an oligarchy was good enough for Dick Whittington, they argue, then it’s good enough for the heart of twenty-first-century London. After all, they say, it works in China.
the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing and Check everything.
Really, you’d expect a cryptopathologist to be a bit more credulous.
I didn’t get anything at the Admiral Duncan except a couple of offers to take me out to dinner.
We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.
The space is criss-crossed at random intervals by escalators, presumably because the architects felt that disorientation and an inability to find the toilets were an integral part of the shopping experience.
For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.
