And This Year's Ian McEwan Award For Pompous Symbolism Goes To...

Entirely without relevance to Britain's choice between Ed Balls and the Bullingdons, an unmanned spacecraft named Progress has gone out of control and will soon fall to bits and mostly burn up. Some of the bits are substantial enough to crash onto the planet's surface, but human beings have a greater chance of being killed while driving or being struck by lightning than of being affected by Progress, which is of course foreign.