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‘So what’s magic, then?’ asked Abigail. ‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not any form of electromagnetic radiation. That I do know.’ ‘Maybe it’s brainwaves,’ said Abigail. ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Because that would be electrochemical and it would still have to involve some kind of physical manifestation if it was going to be projected out of your head.’ So just chalk it up to pixie dust or quantum entanglement, which was the same thing as pixie dust except with the word quantum in it.
‘If you have to walk the tracks with the juice on then you stay off the sleepers. They’re slippery. You slip, you fall, you put your hands out and zap.’ ‘Zap,’ I said. ‘That’s the technical term for it, is it? What do you call someone who’s been zapped?’ ‘Mr Crispy,’ said Kumar. ‘That’s the best you guys can come up with?’ Kumar shrugged. ‘It’s not like it’s a major priority.’
and one whole stack of nothing but Penguin paperbacks from the 1950s. My dad swears by those Penguins, he said that they were so classy that all you had to do was sit in the right café in Soho, pretend to read one and you’d be hip deep in impressionable young women before you ordered your second espresso.
One simple trick
It depicted the ever-popular ‘Venus-Aphrodite surprised by a sculptor and struggling to cover her tits with one hand and keep her drape at waist height with the other’ so beloved of art connoisseurs in the long weary days before the invention of internet porn.
‘My dad was a fairy,’ said Zach. ‘And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.’
Low sample size – one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile.
Like saying “low” when you mean “small”
‘It’s one of those paradox thingies,’ I said. ‘What happens when the unstoppable cook meets the unfillable stomach?’
‘Kumar and I,’ said Nightingale. ‘Not “me and Kumar”.’ Nightingale periodically attempted to improve my grammar and was curiously deaf to what I consider a pretty convincing and sophisticated argument that the rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.
My dad says that the Russians have a saying: a man can get used to hanging if he hangs long enough. Unfortunately, what is true of hanging is not true of the smell of the London sewers, which is truly indescribable. Let’s just say that it’s the sort of smell that follows you home, hangs around outside your door and tries to hack your voicemail.
That’s what I hate about science – negative results.
CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns.
As Conan the Barbarian famously said, That which does not kill us does not kill us.
