  The Aldous gossip process represents the dissemination of information in
geographical space as a process of locally deterministic spread, augmented by
random long range transmissions. Starting from a single initially informed
individual, the proportion of individuals informed follows an almost
deterministic path, but for a random time shift, caused by the stochastic
behaviour in the very early stages of development. In this paper, it is shown
that, even with the extra information available after a substantial development
time, this broad description remains accurate to first order. However, the
precision of the prediction is now much greater, and the random time shift is
shown to have an approximately normal distribution, with mean and variance that
can be computed from the current state of the process.
