I’m always struck by the amount of small gifts Terry Pratchett left us. My whole adult life, I’ve been stumbling across little tidbits of knowledge, references or jokes or even just words, that he inserted into a novel in passing and that I get to feel like I’ve rediscovered like some kind of cultural archeologist. He was so interested in absolutely everything that there’s no telling where I’ll find what I’ve started calling a reverse reference in my head - to me, it’s the real world that’s making a callout to the one in his head. While I love getting the jokes in a Pratchett novel, there’s just something so joyful about the double discovery of a cool new fact and the thought that Terry Pratchett thought it was cool too.
Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.
THE CLOWN WHO opened the little sliding door in the Fools’ Guild’s forbidding gates looked from Vetinari to Moist to Adora Belle, and wasn’t very happy about any of them. “We are here to see Dr. Whiteface,” said Vetinari. “I require you to let us in with the minimum of mirth.” The door snapped back. There was some hurried whispering and a clanking noise, and one half of the double doors opened a little way, just enough for people to walk through in single file. Moist stepped forward, but Vetinari put a restraining hand on his shoulder and pointed up with his stick. “This is the Fools’ Guild,” he said. “Expect…fun.” There was a bucket balanced on the door. He sighed, and gave it a push with his stick. There was a thud and a splash from the other side. “I don’t know why they persist in this, I really don’t,” he said, sweeping through. “It’s not funny and it could hurt someone. Mind the custard.” There was a groan from the dark behind the door.
-Making Money
this april fool’s day, JUST SAY NO to silly pranks!
“I know exactly what you never said. You refrained from saying it very loudly.” Vetinari raised an eyebrow. “I am extremely angry, Mr. Lipwig.”
“But I’ve been dropped right in it!”
“Not by me,” said Vetinari. “I can assure you that if I had, as your ill-assumed street patois has it, ‘dropped you in it,’ you would fully understand all meanings of ‘drop’ and have an unenviable knowledge of ‘it.’”
“You know what I mean!”
“Dear me, is this the real Moist von Lipwig speaking, or is it just the man looking forward to his very nearly gold chain? Topsy Lavish knew she was going and simply changed her will. I salute her for it. The staff will accept you more easily, too. And she’s done you a great favor.”
“Favor? I was shot at!”
“That was just the Assassins’ Guild dropping you a note to say they are watching you.”
“There were two shots!”
“Possibly for emphasis?” said Vetinari, sitting down on a velvet-covered chair.
Most tyrants in fantasy fiction: My greatest nemesis is someone I have tried to kill on multiple occasions, and who may just be my greatest weakness. I cannot rest until I DESTROY them! *maniacal laughter*
Meanwhile, Havelock Vetinari: *drinking a glass of water* The lady who compiles the crosswords is very good at her job-
““Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works.””
— Lord Havelock Vetinari, The Truth, Discworld book 25
One of my favourite things in Guards! Guards! is imagining Vetinari booking it from room to room in the palace in order to appear wherever Wonse goes to escape him. Just going full tilt down hidden passageways only to skid to a halt, quickly smooth himself down, take a deep breath and slip into each new room.
“‘In my experience Miss Cripslock tends to write down exactly what one says,’ Vetinari observed. ‘It’s a terrible thing when journalists do that. It spoils the fun. One feels instinctively that it’s cheating, somehow.’”
After reading Jingo I can never look at Vetenari the same again… oh he’s a scary tyrant? Is he, Rincewind, is he really? The man was juggling. While dressed as a Klatchian. With Nobby and Colon of all people.
And Sergeant Colon looked up and into a growing, greenish, expanding-
The melon exploded, and so did the audience, but both their laughter and the humor was slightly lost on Colon as he scraped over-ripe pith out of his ears.
The survival instinct cut in again. Stagger around backward, it said. So he staggered around backward, waving his legs in the air. Fall down heavily, it said. So he sat down, and almost squashed a chicken. Lose your dignity, it said; of all the things you’ve got, it’s the one you can most afford to lose.
Lord Vetinari helped him up. “Our very lives depend on your appearing to be a stupid fat idiot,” he hissed, putting Colon’s fez back on his head.
Colon tossed him the knives, slowly and gingerly. He’s going to try to stab the guards, he thought. It’s a ruse. And then everyone’s going to tear us apart.
Now the circling blur glinted in the sunlight. There was a murmur of approval from the crowd.
“Yet somehow dull,” said the Patrician.
And his hands moved in a complex pattern that suggested that his wrists must have moved through one another at least twice.
The tangled ball of hurtling fruit and cutlery leapt into the air. Three melons dropped to the ground, cut cleanly in two. Three knives thudded into the dust a few inches from their owner’s sandals.
And Sergeant Colon looked up and into a growing, greenish, expanding-
The melon exploded, and so did the audience, but both their laughter and the humor was slightly lost on Colon as he scraped over-ripe pith out of his ears.
Three fruits arced gently out of the green whirl and thumped on to Al-jibla’s tray.
The guards looked carefully, and to Colon’s mind nervously, at the cross-dressed figure of the cross corporal.
“She’s not going to do any kind of dance, is she?” one of them ventured.
“No!” snapped Beti.
“Promise?”
Nobby grabbed three of the knives and tugged them out of the man’s belt.
“I’ll give them to his lor- to him, shall I, Beti?” said Colon, suddenly quite sure that keeping the Patrician alive was almost certainly the only way to avoid a brief cigarette in the sunshine. He was also aware that other people were drifting over to watch the show.
