👉 Okay, letās tackle this wonderfully prickly little outcrop of linguistic weirdness: the baffling and frankly rather pointy designation ā you guessed it! ā
āhfb station.
Now, before I get bogged down in exhaustive bibliographic trawls (nobody honestly wants that, right?), let me lay out what an āhfb station' essentially is. It doesnāt actually exist as a formally recognised thing, of course. Nope, not at all. Instead, it's basically a very specific, and somewhat tragically unfortunate, inside joke amongst a small, intensely paranoid circle within the late-night procedural beat of the old 60s British TV show
Deadline.
Here's the breakdown that has circulated for decades (and frankly, I feel a little shamefully complicit in perpetuating it. Itās just so wonderfully awful. The original writers and producers, bless their cotton socks, were having anā¦ahemā¦spirited discussion about how to handle a particularly gruesome crime scene. After one too many cigarettes, the shorthand for "the area of the street that no cop will willingly patrol after dark ā absolutely riddled with squatters, drug dens, and frankly, just a general sense of despair. The place you
absolutely don't go.
" was hatched. Hence: the hfb station
You wouldnāt actually find it on any ordnance survey map or crime blotter. You just⦠know. It just
is
. And the implication of a police officer