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.
BEN AARONOVITCHThe Metropolitan Police Service is still, despite what people think, a working-class organisation and as such rejects totally the notion of an officer class.
More Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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What do you think you’re doing?
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This is your brain on magic.
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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.
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He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn’t know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name.
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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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It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.
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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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Every male in the world thinks he’s an excellent driver. Every copper who’s ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves.
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The first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first.
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Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.
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That which does not kill us has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.
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Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.
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The worst part is staying in the room after you’ve broken the news, so that you’re forced to be there when someone’s life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn’t bother them – such people are not to be trusted.
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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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A physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.
BEN AARONOVITCH