Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday has delivered rather more than the customary post-bank-holiday tedium - there is a loan of breathtaking proportions, a medical miracle measured in minutes, and an act of heroism involving a shopping trolley that this Author considers the bravest thing she has encountered all year. There is also a royal announcement of the most welcome kind, and an explosion in Bristol that has so far declined to explain itself.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings monarchs in triumph, comedians in chaos, and a fuel crisis that threatens to ground the British holiday-maker before she has so much as located her passport. This Author has also encountered, quite unexpectedly, a gentleman of eighty-four whose achievement puts every other soul in the Kingdom to considerable shame - hover close, for the details are not to be missed.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday brings dispatches that range from the gravely troubling to the gloriously absurd - and this Author has attended to every last one. Certain members of the Jewish community are hiding their faith beneath a baseball cap, a Prime Minister is performing remarkable feats of political gymnastics, and twenty-one celebrities are preparing to betray one another in the Scottish Highlands for our entertainment. Read on, if you dare.