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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has observed many a week in which the Ton contrived to make a spectacle of itself, but the seven days now concluding have displayed a quite remarkable unity of theme. From Monday to Sunday, the Kingdom has been simultaneously too hot, too indecisive, and altogether too willing to disappoint those who trusted it most.
It began, as these things so often do, with a Prime Minister. In The NHS, a Heatwave, and a Prime Minister Who Cannot Name a Date, we learned that the gentleman at the head of the nation’s affairs cannot produce a date on demand – a skill mastered, one notes, by every debutante before her first season. By Tuesday, in Four Heatwaves, One Missing Appointment, and a Television Sofa Vacated with Dignity, the heat had become the week’s most reliable character – arriving punctually, as the nation pretended to be surprised.
Wednesday brought, in Fifteen Pence, a Guillotine, and the Hottest Wednesday on Record, a travel adaptor of homicidal inclination and a runway levy that charges you before a single stone is laid. Thursday, ever eager to outdo its predecessor, furnished us in Drought, Moonbeams, and a Man of Ninety-Nine Who Simply Wished to Show a Cow with the most affecting figure of the entire week – a gentleman of ninety-nine years whose ambitions were modest, wholesome, and bovine.
Friday’s The Burnham Bounce, the Budget Bind, and a Most Regrettable Petrol Station introduced a funeral director of spectacular cupidity – a figure who managed, against considerable competition, to be the week’s most egregious betrayer of trust. Sunday’s When Mountains Fall Silent and Ballot Papers Refuse To closed proceedings with a national park that has sold its very name for the price of a motor car, which This Author considers a most instructive metaphor for the week entire.
The pattern, Gentle Reader, is plain. The Kingdom sweats, its leaders equivocate, its institutions err – and yet a man of ninety-nine still wishes only to show a cow. There is, in that small fact, more dignity than the rest of the week combined. This Author commends it to your contemplation.
Yours, with a lorgnette in urgent need of rest,
Lady Whistledown