The enemy isn’t men, or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no-one has the right to be stupid.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

People like that don't need a reason apart from "because I can". They have a nightmare and try to make it happen.

Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.")

So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.

...and the funny thing was that people who weren't entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.That would do it every time.