Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday brings a mother's sacrifice in the Bahamas, a contract killer lurking in the corridors of the Conservative Party, and the Metropolitan Constabulary investigating its own conduct in the most tangled of royal affairs. If you had hoped the month might close quietly - this Author must advise you to abandon that hope at once.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday has furnished your devoted Author with a Prime Minister making two very large arguments simultaneously, a Chancellor staring into a thirty-five billion pound abyss, and a Viscount who has apparently rewritten the entire legal framework of these islands on a single sheet of paper. There is also the small matter of a rooftop swindle so prevalent it has become the nation's most fashionable crime - and a tiger, who remains, one is relieved to report, entirely at liberty.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday brings bombers that have vanished into the Atlantic, a whistleblower whose story grows darker by the hour, and a fraudster whose downfall was his own inability to hide his Lego collection. This Author has seldom encountered a morning's intelligence so richly stocked with the grave, the scandalous, and the magnificently absurd - and she would not dream of keeping it from you a moment longer.