Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday delivers catastrophe, comedy, and a thunderstorm in equal measure - and This Author has opinions on all three. From a dancing-lantern platform that profits from peril, to the extraordinary discovery that one may now queue for the privilege of standing atop a Welsh mountain, the day has already exceeded its allotted absurdity. And the rain, when it comes, threatens to be precisely as cooperative as everything else in this Kingdom.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings a rogue's gallery of undeclared benefits, a constabulary in need of its conscience, and a royal grandfather separated from his grandchildren by four long years and a dispute over police protection. This Author has opinions on all of it - and she has not even reached the artificial intelligence that now wishes to diagnose your ailments before you have finished describing them.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday brings a sentencing scandal that has endured far too long, a maternity inquiry that found rather more embedded disgrace than the establishment would prefer, and a political speech so carefully unpinned from detail that one scarcely knows whether to applaud or merely ask a follow-up question. There is also, naturally, more heat on the horizon - and a doorbell camera that has done more for justice this season than many a magistrate.