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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has observed the Ton for longer than she cares to admit, and yet this particular week has managed to astonish even her well-seasoned sensibilities. If one were to seek a theme running beneath the surface of seven days of dispatches, it would be this: the institutions we trust most reliably to protect us have spent the fortnight doing precisely the opposite, whilst assorted eccentrics have rushed cheerfully into the breach.
Consider, if you will, the arc of it. The week opened on Monday with survivors meeting their abusers in the bread aisle whilst justice dawdled somewhere in the middle distance. By Tuesday, the Chancellor’s numbers were performing feats no respectable arithmetic ought to attempt, and the nation’s spaniels remained cruelly overcharged. Wednesday brought a farming scheme that evaporated faster than goodwill at a budget announcement, and a velvet jacket This Author would have words about, given sufficient column inches.
Then came the grimmer passages. Thursday delivered women failed by medicine, a village poisoned by its own cookware, and a government proposal of such spectacular obliviousness that satire wept and retired. Friday confirmed that a court returned a predator to his window, which is the sort of sentence This Author hoped never to write. Saturday offered 114 guilty verdicts, a cabinet feud conducted with the restraint of a drawing room brawl, and a £111 million lottery winner who had the great good sense to remain anonymous – a principle This Author respects deeply and practises daily.
And so to Sunday, which gave us burst pipes, impudent nurses, and a waterlogged Labrador dangling triumphantly above a Yorkshire gorge. In a week in which nearly every institution of consequence failed somebody, it was a wet dog, cheerfully rescued, that provided the sole unambiguous victory. This Author finds that entirely fitting. She remains, as ever, watching.