Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday delivers a quartet of dispatches grave enough to give one pause and one glittering discovery to restore the faith. Four thousand souls face uncertain futures at a most celebrated carriage house, a beloved news presenter reveals a battle fought in dignified silence - and a Victorian lady who talked her way into a museum with no qualifications whatsoever has finally received the recognition she deserved some one hundred years ago. This Author has opinions on all of it, naturally.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday brings a sorrow that silences even this Author's most practiced wit - and yet it brings also a convicted Mayor, a gilt crisis of twenty-eight years' standing, and women in the Principality compelled to the most extraordinary of disguises. The Kingdom's affairs have, once again, contrived to be simultaneously tragic and utterly, bewilderingly absurd.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings a column that ranges from the schoolroom to the gaol cell, from the gravest of anniversaries to the most theatrical of political reshuffles. Nearly half of the Kingdom's teachers plan to quit, a rabbi speaks of a community more frightened now than on the day of the attack, and Lady Badenoch rearranges her china whilst the house debates whose dangerous prisoners these really are - yours to discover within.