Wire in the Blood

[Dave Potts]

Does anyone have a definitive answer for the origin of this phrase? I've googled it but there seems to be lots of conjecture - anyone actually know ? Ta!

[Quizmonster]

Dave, I've looked through literally dozens of quotation and idiom websites as well as books of those on my shelves here and none of them mentions the phrase. I suspect it is simply an 'invention' of Val McDermid's. She's the author of the original novel on which the TV series is based. There is an e-mail address [email protected] It might be worth asking the lady herself, as it were, where she got the concept from!

[thewillow]

It comes from TS Eliot's Burnt Norton. Second verse: Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars.