Programme of interest

As my wife and I never watched the TV series "Person of Interest" when it started and didn’t watch any later episodes because they wouldn’t make sense, we bought the first three series on DVD and have been watching those. We are still only partway through series two. I realised that this situation might never end and eventually we would have to buy more series on DVD as I hadn’t kept track of which episodes were currently showing on TV. We watched one episode on DVD last night. Yesterday I put my back out working in the garden and my activities are currently limited as a consequence, so after lunch today I looked through the TV guide for some daytime TV to watch. I virtually never watch TV in the early afternoon. I noticed that "Person of Interest" was about to start on one channel and idly wondered which episode it was although I had no intention of watching it. On checking I discovered that it was the first episode of series four, so I immediately programmed our recorder to record the entire series. Quite by coincidence I had discovered the very series that I wanted to record live with less than ten minutes to spare, never having looked into the matter before since buying the DVDs. I still have nothing to watch on TV at present though, which is why I am writing this story here to pass the time. My reason for taking an interest in coincidences is explained on my website MensTemporum.uk. It all started when I wrote a draft novel, my only attempt at fiction writing, during 2011, completing it close to the time that "Person of Interest" started to be shown in the USA in September 2011. In my novel a group of people use a unique machine to help others who are going to encounter trouble in the future, but this machine is capable of acquiring information directly from the future, rather than deducing it from information obtained during the present as in "Person of Interest". It’s still an interesting coincidence of plots and timing though. Nowadays I just take such coincidences for granted as they seem to happen to me so often, but I am surprised that they can be demonstrated to be statistically likely in such numbers. I might not have bothered to document this incident at all had it not been for my incapacity, which was itself what caused it to occur in the first place.