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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has observed the Ton across many a turbulent season, and yet the week just passed has furnished revelations enough to exhaust even the most seasoned gossip. Consider the sheer ambition of it all. The week opened, as the very best theatrical productions do, with a constable shot in the foot and a bomb threat to one hundred and sixty schools that proved entirely fictitious – though as Nearly a Million Lost Souls, and Someone Shot an Officer in the Foot made plain, the nation’s children require no invented emergencies when real ones press so heavily upon them.
Tuesday offered the Chancellor unmoved, a Prime Minister tilting at car park extortion, and a banking outage that left eighty million souls patting their empty pockets – all catalogued with appropriate gravity in Parking Grace, Tax Disgrace, and the Small Matter of Benefits for Killers. Wednesday then arrived with its customary opinions, delivered via sewage and solicitors of dubious virtue, in Sewage, Storms, and Solicitors of Dubious Virtue: Wednesday Has Opinions.
By Thursday, a banking house had bid farewell to five thousand faithful servants whilst recording handsome profits – a coincidence This Author finds most instructive – and a beloved Dame of the stage now navigates the world by the warmth of strangers, as Five Thousand Fewer Bankers, and a Dame Who Cannot See the Bill records. Friday brought a duchess’s anguished statement and the next great fictional spy stepping into his inheritance, per Fathers, Fathers-in-Law, and the Peculiar Business of Becoming the Next Bond. And Saturday, never wishing to be outdone, produced a contract killer in the Conservative Party’s corridors, a mother’s sacrifice in the Bahamas, and the Metropolitan Constabulary investigating its own conduct – all duly noted in Courage, Conspiracy, and a Contract Killer Walk Into the Conservative Party.
The pattern, Gentle Reader, is one This Author has long suspected: the Ton does not stumble into chaos. It arrives there with tremendous energy, considerable planning, and a breathtaking indifference to consequence. Until next week, do endeavour to behave – though This Author holds out little hope that you shall.