In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

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.

Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

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. 'A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.' I stared at him. 'You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?' 'Actually I knocked out two,' said Nightingale. 'I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver's eye slot and one down the commander's hatch - brewed up rather nicely.

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.

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.