Ben Aaronovitch

Important safety tip for serial killers — always scout out your dumping locations before use

People who’ve had their lives disrupted are looking for order and predictability — even if it’s just in the little things.

When in doubt, make it somebody else’s problem.

The force of them rolled in like a wave and a confusion of images and smells. Coal smoke and brick dust, cardamom and ginger, damp straw and warm hops, pub piano, wet cotton and sloe gin, tonic water and rose petals, sweat and blood.

with her came the smell of salt and the crash of gunpowder and the crack of canvas under strain.

Instead, I made the usual squirmy excuses and promises of the fully grown man faced with his mum’s uncanny ability to knock ten years off his age at will.

It’s the sort of exciting intergenerational and ethnic conflict that makes life in the big city worth living.

She smelt of cocoa butter and rainwater, of snogging on the sofa with News at Ten on mute and Tracy Chapman singing ‘Fast Car’ on your parents’ stereo. Paint-smelling DIY Sundays and sun warmed car seats, of pound parties with the furniture piled up in the bedrooms and wardrobe speakers wedged into the living room thudding in your chest cavity while somebody’s mother holds court in the kitchen dispensing rum and Coke. I wanted to snake my arm around her waist and feel the warm skin under my fingers so badly that it was like a memory of something I’d already done. My arm twitched.

Things can be two things at once, in fact things can be three things at once.

if you’ve ever done clean-up at Glastonbury then nothing short of highgrade nuclear waste will ever scare you again.