Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4)

by Terry Pratchett

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He’d been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

It wasn’t proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing.

“I hope you are not impugning my men, sir.” “Vimes, Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs have never been pugn’d in their entire lives.”

He looked at the face in the mirror. Unfortunately, it was his.

He was also reradiating the field of angered innocence that was, to her, part of his essential Vimesness.

“Look, Nobby, when all’s said and done they ain’t the right color, and there’s an end to it.” “Good job you found out, Fred!” said Nobby, so cheerfully that Sergeant Colon was almost sure that he meant it. “Well, it’s obvious,” he conceded. “Er . . . what is the right color?” said Nobby. “White, of course!” “Not brick-red, then? ’Cos you—” “Are you winding me up, Corporal Nobbs?” “’Course not, sarge. So . . . what color am I?” That caused Sergeant Colon to think. You could have found, somewhere on Corporal Nobbs, a shade appropriate to every climate on the disc and a few found only in specialist medical books. “White’s . . . white’s a state of, you know . . . mind,” he said. “It’s like . . . doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, that sort of thing. And washing regular.” “Not lazing around, sort of thing.” “Right.” “Or . . . like . . . working all hours like Goriff does.” “Nobby—” “And you never see those kids of his with dirty clo—”

Especially since it was a map of Klatch and everyone knew that Klatch was sand anyway, which made it rather satisfying in an existential sort of way, although this sand here had been commandeered from the heap behind Chalky the troll’s wholesale pottery and bore the occasional cigarette end and trace of feline incontinence that would probably not be found in the real desert, or certainly not to scale.

It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

Theft was the only crime, whether the loot was gold, innocence, land or life.

He was in the immediate company of a man even the Assassins’ Guild was frightened of, another man who would stay up all night in order to invent an alarm clock to wake him up in the morning, and a man who had never knowingly changed his underwear.

‘Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.’