Dirk gave a gracious bow of his head to the man’s retreating back, and then hurried on, opening the newspaper at the horoscope page as he did so. “Virtually everything you decide today will be wrong,” it said bluntly.

More from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

• I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
• It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, “as pretty as an airport.” Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.
• It was a battered yellow Citroën 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones.
• Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.
• You would probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about when he climbed into bed at night and turned off the light.
• A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.