I felt, the other day, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The nova in my telescope was not just a new word but a new tense. No doubt this heavenly portent bodes no good. The tense might be called the past continuous future. (It is something the opposite of the paulo-post-future.) There was a good example on the television receiver after the collapse of the panda-like mating ritual between Mr Gerry Adams and the Revd Ian Paisley. ‘There were always going to be recriminations after the failure of the deal,’ said the reporter.
Were there, indeed? That rather supposes the inevitability of what has happened. If the deal had not failed, where would the ‘always going to’ be? For this reason the tense might be called the Hindsight Future. The Hindsight Future is often used with the commentator’s Magisterial Impersonal: ‘It was always going to be a difficult year for Mr Blunkett.’
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