Sublime

‘You’re our longest-serving contributor,’ said Carleton, flinching at the bang. ‘Our most admired. Indeed I should say our most popular.’ I’m beginning to speak like him, he thought: Thomas Hart is catching, that’s the trouble. ‘I’ve often heard it said that it’s a consolation – that’s the general feeling, as I said to the board – to wake on Thursd

How’s tricks in the sticks,

Another enduring name for the force as a whole is of course the Old Bill, originally a cartoon character of the First World War who was portrayed as a grumbling Cockney soldier with a walrus moustache. The ‘police’ meaning emerged when the character, this time wearing police uniform, appeared in posters during the Second World War giving advice on

Musical Mob’s ‘Pulse X’ and ‘Believe Me’ by DJ Wire (which came along a bit later) – those were the

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel