Has anybody else come across this unusual short story by EM Forster, originally published in a university magazine in 1909? I think it’s Forster’s only foray into science fiction: a dystopian story set in a world where the middle classes live underground, their every want serviced by ‘The Machine’; until it breaks down, and they’re left to their own devices. The heroine (an obese woman) has to crawl to the surface, where she comes across the plebs who have been keeping the machine running for all these years, but no longer. I’ve forgotten what the outcome is.

You can see the contemporary social and political message behind this little fable (Forster was quite left-wing); but I’ve been experiencing it more literally over the past week or so. My internet connection has broken down. I can no longer receive or send emails, and was parted from my blogsite, until I found a devious way around that half an hour ago: hence this post, which I hope gets through. Apple have a ‘genius desk’ in another suburb of Stockholm, but the snow is so thick here that it’s difficult, even dangerous, to drive there. I’ve phoned everywhere else – in Britain as well as Sweden; but with no joy.

Hence my silence on the major event of the last few days, Trump’s invasion of Venezuela; which as the author of a book on historical American ‘imperialism’ I might be expected to have a view on, but haven’t been able to communicate it until now. I need one of the plebs – young men and women, schooled in these mysteries – to come down and help me. Otherwise I feel like the fat woman in the story.