Every Step Is A First Step If

Ninety Percent Of Most Magic Merely Consists Of Knowing One Extra Fact.

They Felt, In Fact, Tremendously Bucked-up, Which Was How Lady Ramkin Would Almost Certainly Have Put It And Which Was Definitely Several Letters Of The Alphabet Away From How They Normally Felt.

At Some Time In The Recent Past Someone Had Decided To Brighten The Ancient Corridors Of The University By Painting Them, Having Some Vague Notion That Learning Should Be Fun. It Hadn’t Worked. It’s A Fact Known Throughout The Universes That No Matter How Carefully The Colors Are Chosen, Institutional Decor Ends Up As Either Vomit Green, Unmentionable Brown, Nicotine Yellow Or Surgical Appliance Pink. By Some Little-understood Process Of Sympathetic Resonance, Corridors Painted In Those Colors Always Smell Slightly Of Boiled Cabbage—even If No Cabbage Is Ever Cooked In The Vicinity.

I Grow As Many Of Our Vegetables As I Can, Because My Granddad Was A Professional Gardener, And It's In The Blood.

I Read The 'old Testament' All The Way Through When I Was About 13 And Was Horrified. A Few Months Afterwards I Read 'the Origin Of Species', Hallucinating Very Mildly Because I Was In Bed With Flu At The Time. Despite That, Or Because Of That, It All Made Perfect Sense.