“I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me ... Eventually a local warden came up to me and said , "Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons," with such an expression of civic determination that I pretense not to understand English. Instead, I listed my way through various "eh?" sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that since I was neither nationality, I wasn't worth the bother.”

“He glanced up as I entered, and for a moment, looked almost surprised."Mr. Swift!""Ta-da!" I exclaimed weakly."You're still...""Still not dead. That's me. It's my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time.”

“Offer me?" A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. "Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports."How does that make Britain great?""Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!"I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing."The second," she went on, "is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptions, the Today Program and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!""Oh," I said, feeling that something was expected. "Oh" was enough."And lastly, we have the NHS!""This is an NHS service?" I asked incredulously."I didn't say that, I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.”

“I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I'm sure you've heard of him. I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We... made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us.”

“I looked at Judith. "This sounds strange, but I don't suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?""No," she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman."Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm..." I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded "teleportation" word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway?”

“It's the new me," I explained, waving my hands jazz-style in greeting. "Matthew Swift, Midnight fucking Mayor - I've got multicoloured highlighters and everything.”

“The majority of the employees here are civilians," explained my Alderman guide/protector/companion/would-be-executioner as we strode without a word to the security guards through the foyer towards the lifts. "They conduct themselves within perfectly standard financial services and regulations. There is one specialist suboperational department catering to the financing of more...unusual extra-capital ventures, and the executive assets who operate it have to undergo a rigorous level of training, psyche evaluation, personality assessment, and team operational analyses."We stared at him, and said, "We barely understood the little words.""No," he replied, "I didn't think you would.”