I just had an idea for a cheap form of power: by bringing pasta and antipasta together, we could be looking… — Jasper Fforde

Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain latitude across the nation?”

“Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.”

“Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end.”

The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Service should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out—and that journey starts now.”

“The ChronoGuard has shut itself down, and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically and theoretically…impossible.”

“Good thing, too,” replied Landen. “It always made my head ache. In fact I was thinking of doing a self-help book for SF novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don’t.”