Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday has delivered warmth in places that least expected it - meteorological, emotional, and diplomatic - whilst serving a chill to those who perhaps deserved one. A duchess has returned, a chancellor has promised breathing space without specifying where one might sit, and fifteen creatures the size of pencil tips have, in this Author's considered view, outshone almost everyone else in the news. Do read on.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings royal parallels that chill the blood, a nation's drug supply that grows more lethal by the week, and a political inheritance in North Britain that would test the most resolute of souls. There is also, if you will believe it, a crisis involving tens of thousands of stranded fridge-freezers - a sentence This Author did not expect to write, and yet here we all are.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday brings a Palace rebuttal of such exquisite precision that this Author nearly applauded, a drug two years overdue that has arrived at last for a thousand women, and a stranger who read a plea on the digital salons and promptly donated a kidney - because why not. The day is grave, the day is warm, and the day is, in its way, rather remarkable.