Notes On A Lack of Scandal

I'm comfortably listening to Radio 4. Suddenly I hear a demented but tooth-grindingly familiar melody. I drop my mug of coffee on the workstop where it will bounce a couple of times, and launch myself headlong at the radio, one arm stretched out ahead, to connect to the off button on the radio. All in slow motion of course - I sail through the air, a look of pain on my suddenly pale face, splashes of coffee gracefully ascending from the worktop, and there is a slowed-down shout of

Nooooo!

It's The Archers, of course, and if anyone else in Britain is anything like me then I'd imagine there must be a sudden drop in power usage on the national grid at that moment.

Foreshadowing

Why the gap in blog posts? Was I on holiday again? No. To tell the truth, I was planning a post after reading the Iliad - it just lasted me a little longer than I'd first anticipated. Don't know why that should have occasioned me such surprsie, given that it runs to 24 books. But then you get caught up reading footnotes, and one thing leads to another, and...

The subject this time is foreshadowing. It's almost a dirty word in storytelling. 'Little did young Christopher Plumley he know, when he first joined the service of Count von Dastard D'e'Ville, of what horrors would transpire...' Who would write such a sentence now? It seems quaint, from a period when the world was Newtonian, effects followed causes, and clockwork inevitability seemed a fact of life. I suppose this is what would traditionally have been called fate - a subject that doesn't come up in fiction too often. But more's the pity?