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Dearest Gentle Reader,
What a week it has been. This Author has surveyed the dispatches of the past seven days and detected, with no great surprise, a single unifying theme: the Kingdom is, in every conceivable sense, overheating. The evidence is abundant. It began on Tuesday, when Gold Earrings, Banana Shipments, and a Kingdom That Cannot Keep Cool delivered cocaine in the fruit bowl and amber alerts in the sky – a combination This Author considers both dramatic and deeply ungrateful of the weather. Wednesday pressed the point with Five Thousand Prisoners, Thirty-Eight Degrees, and a Police Force That Let a Monster Walk Free, in which the prisons bulged, the thermometers climbed, and certain constabularies demonstrated a talent for looking precisely the wrong direction at precisely the wrong moment.
Thursday offered brief celestial relief – Ninety Per Cent Dark, and Still No One Could Find Eclipse Glasses – though the economy, one notes, remained resolutely uneclipsed in its mediocrity. Friday brought Pagers, Pastures, and a Parliament of One, featuring a gentleman who arranged his own triumph and then absented himself from it, which This Author considers a masterstroke of political theatre. By Saturday, The Kingdom Was on Fire, and Heathrow Had Sprung a Leak – simultaneously burning and flooding, which is a feat even This Author must acknowledge as impressively catastrophic. Sunday concluded matters with Gold Medals, Wildfire, and a Fraudster at the Finish Line, wherein British sprinters made quiet history while a scoundrel made rather louder chaos.
The pattern, Gentle Reader, is perfectly clear. Whilst the Kingdom burns, floods, leaks, and stumbles, its athletes simply keep winning. This Author suggests the government take notes. Until next week, she remains, as ever, your most devoted and watchful correspondent.