This is drift on my part, but it seems a natural enough drift.

The truth is these things always come out of the blue unpredictable, and then looking back they seem inevitable, and it seems strange that people lived through the times leading up to them sleepwalking, as if they must have known what was coming.

The months leading up to the First World War are a classic example. In a secondhand bookshop I once came across a book (I don't mean a book about it, I mean the actual physical book) in which young people at a New Year party had been writing down their signatures in ink, and playing a party game involving signatures. The idea was, you write the name along the line, and then fold the paper along the line - the strangest patterns emerge. It was New Year 1914, and the name of the game, written in the book, was "Ghosts of My Friends."