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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has surveyed the week’s proceedings with her customary lorgnette and arrived at a conclusion that will surprise precisely no one who has been paying attention: the Kingdom is, in every measurable sense, coming apart at the seams – and doing so with remarkable consistency across all five days of the working week.
It began, as catastrophe so often does, on a Monday. Punished for Success, Queuing on a Mountain, and the Algorithm That Profits From Disaster established the week’s governing theme with admirable efficiency: that the English will queue for anything, including suffering, and that there is always someone positioned to sell them a ticket for the privilege. By Wednesday, the tone had darkened considerably. Bills, Failures, and a Gangland Lord Roused Before Dawn brought apologies thirty years overdue and a Glasgow gentleman whose morning schedule was rudely rearranged – proof that accountability, when it finally arrives, keeps no respectable hours.
Thursday offered us Chickens in California, Brains in the Future, and a Blood Moon Over the Cotswolds, which This Author regards as either the week’s most poetic dispatch or its most alarming. Possibly both. Friday’s ground, it transpires, gave way – literally beneath respectable houses – which serves as a perfectly adequate metaphor for the whole of the week. And on Saturday, the curtain fell upon a nation simultaneously drenched and running dry, which is, Gentle Reader, the most English sentence This Author has ever written.
The pattern, as ever, is plain to any observer willing to look: the ground shifts, the skies open, the institutions apologise too late, and the algorithms collect their fee. This Author remains, through it all, faithfully yours.