I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police “first greeting”. “Oi!” I said “What do you think you’re doing?
BEN AARONOVITCHIf you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth.
More Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park – it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.
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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.
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What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.
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If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.
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On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.
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…don’t ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let’s just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that.
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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.
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And 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.
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When you’re a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don’t want to know.
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If you just warn people, they often simply ignore you. But if you ask them a question, then they have to think about it.
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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.
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What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?’ I asked. ‘That would be a tiger,’said Nightingale. ‘Well don’t tell Greenpeace,’ I said. ‘They’re an endagered species.’ ‘Not that sort of tiger,’ said Nightingale. ‘
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The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop
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The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.
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Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.
BEN AARONOVITCH