sixth-light:

sixth-light:

sixth-light:

If I did write the Starlingale whoops-apparently-we-got-married-years-ago story, which I am way too busy to do, it would also feature Sahra Guleed’s lawyer sister and Peter and Nightingale being strictly instructed that whatever else they do, having managed to avoid sleeping together for the first eight years of their surprise marriage, they should keep on doing that, because it’s going to be way simpler when they file for divorce if they can truthfully swear they’ve never had that sort of relationship.

This turns out to be the worst version of the white elephant game ever.

“It had all
been in the name of data security anyway: we’d been fielding some very pointed
questions from, of all things, a student journalist who’d crossed paths with us
(a friend of Abigail’s, and don’t think I didn’t blame Abigail for that) and
she’d been particularly interested in how long, exactly, Nightingale had been
working for the Met. I blamed Nightingale, too, for making a casual reference
to the winter the waste collectors had struck under Thatcher – he still looked
about forty, but these days that meant he looked more or less like an average
Millennial. I’d told him that once and he’d taken about a week to forgive me.
For that I blame the Telegraph, which he still persists in buying ‘for the
crossword’ and which has adopted the sad habit of using ‘Millennial’ as a
shorthand for ‘young people of whom we disapprove’. And they definitely mean whom. “

FML

I sat down in the kitchen with a cup of tea
and a biscuit and did my best to come up with a list of entirely unreasonable behaviour
on Nightingale’s part that would be grounds for a divorce. 

“Listen,” I said to Molly, who was sharpening
the knives – I’d almost left her to it, but she wasn’t doing it with any
particular zeal, so it seemed safe enough. “You’ve lived with him for, like, a
century by now. I’ll take suggestions. There must be something.” 

Molly thought about this for about ten minutes
and finally indicated, via a combination of props and economical gesture, that
she was unimpressed at Nightingale’s habit of only drinking half of a cup of
coffee and then leaving the half-full cup on a table somewhere. Then she
shrugged, as if to say that was the best she had. 

“Right,” I said. “I’ll put that down.”