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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has spent the week in close study of the great and the grotesque, and has arrived at a conclusion that will surprise precisely no one: the British capacity for institutional failure is not merely intact but flourishing, like some dreadful weed that thrives the more one pretends not to notice it.
We began on Monday with Footballing Treachery, Miracle Surgery, and the Navy Versus a Rubber Dinghy, in which the Royal Navy – that storied institution – found itself requiring French permission to perform a rescue. One does hope the paperwork was filed promptly. Tuesday delivered Fire on the Water, Storms on the Horizon, and Boys Who Ought to Know Better, whose alarming statistics This Author commends to every member of the Cabinet, should any of them still be reading.
By Wednesday, with Nazis, Dewormers, and a Shirtless Stranger, the week had taken a turn that defied easy categorisation. Thursday’s Cartwheels, Plagiarism, and a Funeral Director Who Deserves No Flowers introduced an undertaker whose audacity, This Author concedes, almost commands a reluctant admiration. Almost. Friday brought Footballers, Disorder, and the Curious Matter of Ten Centimetres, a dispatch whose eyebrows remain, as promised, entirely unresolved.
Saturday’s When the Watchdog Watches the Watchmen, and the Bed Bugs Watch Everyone served as a fitting capstone – two women lost, a marriage dissolved, and bedbugs in Cambridge completing what respectability began. The theme of the week, Gentle Reader, is not scandal. It is accountability, conspicuous by its absence. This Author notices. This Author always notices.
Until next week, yours with unfailing attention,
This Author