Dearest Gentle Reader, this day has furnished your devoted Author with a political resignation that may be the most theatrical since the invention of theatre, a £37 billion missile that will not be ready for several years, and news that the sea itself is running a fever. The octopus, it seems, is the only creature in these islands with a coherent strategy - and This Author has questions about Virgin Media that £28 million has not yet fully answered.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday finds the Kingdom in a state of most exquisite disorder - a prime minister bids farewell with suspicious self-congratulation, a World Cup match proposes to begin at an hour only owls and publicans consider civilised, and the Tartan Army continues its peculiar mission to crown every statue in the civilised world with a traffic cone. This Author has observations on all of it, and she does not intend to keep them to herself.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday brings a state apology decades in the making, a convicted people smuggler discovered living most comfortably in Leicestershire, and a defence spending plan with a rather conspicuous hole in its pocket. This Author has notes - and, for once, not all of them are amusing.