A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is odd to reflect that this week a great many people are worrying simultaneously about weather in the past and weather in the future. We hope it will be fine for the Coronation; and we hope that it was fine for the assault on Everest. We have largely got out of the habit of speculating about the outcome of events which we know have already occurred. Some of us reverted to it in the last war, when ships or troops or aircraft had to observe wireless silence during the opening phases of an operation; and I suspect that we bore the comparatively short interludes of suspense much less phlegmati- cally than our ancestors, who often had to wait months before they learnt whether some great enterprise had failed or suc- ceeded. "It somehow makes it all the more dramatic," a man said to me yesterday, "knowing that they've had a go and yet not knowing whether they've got to the top." I suppose it really depends what you're used to. Our great-great-grand- fathers would have found it indescribably dramatic if they could have read about the Battle of Trafalgar the day after it was fought; we relish or anyhow are impressed by the novelty. of an experience which was commonplace for them.
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