This week’s Sunday Funnies is from Christopher Fowler’s wonderfully English, fantastically hysterical The Water-Room .

He had been described as ‘independent to the point of vexation and individual to the level of eccentricity’, which seemed accurate enough.

-‘He made me read a couple eye charts. I passed with flying colours.’
‘Really? You can’t usually see a hole in a ladder.’

— ‘…I tried calling you…but your mobile wasn’t answering.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. It got wet, so I tried to dry it out in Janice’s sandwich toaster. The toaster and the phone sort of—melded-into a single appliance, scientifically interesting as a new mechanical lifeform but utterly useless for communication.’

— [The pathologist on the case:] ‘Do you know what the most popular murder weapon is in Britain? A screwdriver. Have you ever brought me a screwdriver victim? No, I get human sacrifices, torsos in bin-bags and curate poisonings. Just once you could bring me an open-and-shut job. A nice simple confession on the statement—He came toward me so I hit him. Common assault not good enough for you?’

-…but it still looked like a place Death would choose to sit and read a paper.

-…he took down his copy of The Luddite’s Guide to the Internet and decided to [???] May’s new Macintosh laptop.
Half an hour later, May arrived…
[Bryant:] ‘Ah, there you are. What do you know about Hot Dutch Interspecies Love?’ Bryant looked up from the computer. ‘Specifically, how to get rid of it.’
‘What have you done?’ asked May… The last time Bryant has accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.
‘I was trying to find the address of the Amsterdam Spiritualist Society and I had to give these people my credit details for some reason and then the screen filled up with the most disgusting pictures of ladies in barnyards. When I tried to cancel my American Express card, I somehow went through to the Parker Meridian Hotel in New York, specifically their internal telephone system. I followed the recorded instructions about entering a code, then everything went dead and a man started threatening me with a lawsuit. He says I’ve crashed their switchboard and now all these horrible animal pictures are popping up again. I hope I haven’t broken the Internet.

— ‘I don’t know why you had to get rid of your old Rover.’
‘It was starting to steer itself,’ said Bryant mysteriously. ‘The man in the garage said he’d never had a car fail every single item on its MOT before. He was quite excited…’ ‘Come on, it’s quite safe.’
‘No thanks. You nearly killed us the other day, going around Vauxhall roundabout.’
‘They’d changed the one-way system without tell anyone.’
‘I seem to recall that you were on the pavement.’
‘Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the pavement begins these days.’
‘It’s usually the bit with the stoppers on…’

— ‘Why are the urban English so vocal nowadays?’ ‘Go to Paris, Madrid, Berlin, even Rome, you don’t get this kind of behaviour. It’s Hogarth’s picture of Gin Lane all over again.’
‘Arthur, you used to sound your age. Now you’re sounding several centuries old.’
‘What’s wrong with that? One of the great pleasures that used to come with senior citizenship was the right to be perfectly vile to everyone. You could say whatever you liked and people excused you out of respect for your advanced years. But now that everyone is in touch with their emotions and says exactly what they feel, even that pleasure has been taken away. Is there nothing the young haven’t usurped?’

— ‘Is that the business I heard him mentioning to Janice? Some fellow the new Dutch consul was seen chasing across Russell Square at two in the morning? It should be fairly obvious what that was about, even to the Home Office. Says he was a thief. I suppose that a tad more believable than the Welsh secretary reckoning Jamaican boys on Clapham Common were asking him out to dinner at midnight…’

— [Land’s] got the charm of a rectal probe…

-‘…What will it take to make you act in a reasonable manner?’
‘Reincarnation?’

— ‘You’re in luck,’ she declared, in a booming, institutional timbre that probably proved useful when dealing with the inebriated, but was guaranteed to annoy everyone else.
— Bryant had decided a long time ago that he was far too strange to find anyone who would love him. He had, of course, underestimated the bravery and ferocity of the British female…

— ‘I honestly believe that if women could learn to read the A-Z in a moving vehicle we’d have no need of men at all…’ [The a to zed is a book of all the streets in a given area-great fun to browse, really]

— ‘At the end of each [Agatha Christie] book someone would always standup and announce, “It’s very simple, Major Carruthers rewound the vicar’s clock and replaced Lady Home-Counties’ mackintosh in the belfry before hiding the boat hook under a tin of caramelized peaches in the fete’s jam tent.”’

— ‘… Mr Bryant has never been very successful with the ladies. His idea of a chat up line used to be asking a girl if she’d like to see where he had his operation.’
‘What did he show them?’
‘The Royal Free Hospital.’