🪃 Grammar B2-18: Future in the past

Every future form you own points forward from now. Future in the past moves your feet: you stand at a past moment and point forward from there, and every form slides one step back with you — will becomes would, am going to becomes was going to, am meeting becomes was meeting, am about to becomes was about to. That single slide does two very different jobs. The first is the everyday excuse machine: I was going to call you, but my phone died — a plan that existed and, almost always, failed, with was about to catching the last interrupted second. The second is the storyteller's would, the foreshadowing move that hands a reader a real later fact early: it was a trip that would change everything. Because a B2 learner now holds three separate woulds, the material spends a full worked run separating this one from the conditional would and the past-habit would of B2-3, and it drills hardest on the unfulfilled plan, where the implied failure is carried by the form itself. Two tappable texts — a story opening thick with foreshadowing and a Monday-morning dialogue built out of excuses — show both jobs in real prose, and the traps target the two errors that survive longest: a will that never slid inside past narration, and was going to misread as physical movement.