#mine reblog

spacecapart:

‘And now, it’s war… and you’re in the middle. Not on either side. You’re the stupid little band of brownjobs. You’re beneath contempt. But believe me, boys - you’ll rise.’

It’s the Glorious 25th today, so here’s a young Vimes on the barricades, doing the job that’s in front of him. I’ve got a lot of emotions about all the themes in Night Watch, but that’s one of the phrases that especially stuck with me: “You do the job that’s in front of you.” It’s what kept Vimes going when he was stranded in the past, it’s what those seven men buried in Small Gods died for, and it’s become a bit of a mantra for me over the past year when I’ve been faced with various situations that I just had to knuckle down and get through, including this whole pandemic business. Sometimes, all you can do is deal with things as they come. 

‘History finds a way. The nature of events changed, but the nature of the dead had not. It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked footnote of history, but they hadn’t been mean or shameful men. They hadn’t run, and they could have run with honour. They’d stayed, and he wondered if the path had seemed as clear to them then as it did to him now. They’d stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they chose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them-’