The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

was because they managed to spend less money.
    Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
    But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
    This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
    *
    The natural condition of the common swamp dragon is to be chronically ill, and the natural state of an unhealthy dragon is to be laminated across the walls, floor and ceiling of whatever room it is in. A swamp dragon is a badly run, dangerously unstable chemical factory one step from disaster. One quite small step.
    It has been speculated that its habit of exploding violently when angry, excited, frightened or merely plain bored is a developed survival trait † to discourage predators. Eat dragons, it proclaims, and you’ll have a case of indigestion to which the term ‘blast radius’ will be appropriate.
    *
    To understand why dwarfs and trolls don’t like each other you have to go back a long way.
    They get along like chalk and cheese. Very like chalk and cheese, really. One is organic, the other isn’t, and also smells a bit cheesy. Dwarfs make a living by smashing up rocks with valuable minerals in them and the silicon-based lifeform known as trolls are, basically, rocks with valuable minerals in them.
    *
    Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was.
    Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.
    Carrot was not stupid. He was direct, and honest, and good-natured and honourable in all his dealings. In Ankh-Morpork this would normally have added up to ‘stupid’ in any case and would have given him the survival quotient of a jellyfish in a blast furnace, but there were a couple of other factors. One was a punch that even trolls had learned to respect. The other was that Carrot was genuinely, almost supernaturally, likeable. He got on well with people, even while arresting them. He had an exceptional memory for names.

    Vimes would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a good copper,
    but he’d probably be spared the chore because lots of other people would happily admit it for him.

    There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they’d seenthe need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, ‘Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-con-tinuum!’ or ‘Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!’

    No clowns were funny.
    That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable. It was nice to know there was someone worse off than you.

    Three and a half minutes after waking up, Captain Samuel Vimes, Night Watch, staggered up the last few steps on to the roof of the city’s opera house, gasped for breath and threw up allegro ma non troppo.
    *
    He didn’t know much about gargoyles. Carrot had said something once about how marvellous it was, an urban troll species that had evolved a symbiotic relationship with gutters, and he had admired the way they funnelled run-off water into their ears and out through fine sieves in their mouths. You didn’t get many birds nesting on buildings colonized by gargoyles.
    *
    Vimes snorted. I grew up here, he thought, and when I walk down the street everyone says, ‘Who’s that glum bugger?’ Carrot’s been here a few months and everyone knows him. And he knows everyone.