Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday brings revelations most extraordinary - corner shops with a rather more creative product range than one might expect, a £662 million handshake across the Channel that has caused no small controversy, and a former prime minister with some thoroughly convenient concerns about the very industry now signing his pay cheques. This Author's eyebrows have scarcely had a moment's rest.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday brings gangs stripping shelves of steak, a national breakfast preserve stripped of its very identity, and legislators learning to treat death threats as merely another Monday morning inconvenience. There is, too, a story of such quiet human courage that even this Author was obliged to pause - and that, Gentle Reader, almost never happens.

Dearest Gentle Reader, This Author finds herself besieged on all sides this day by whispers of missiles gone astray, a vanished Duchess whom all of America wishes to question under oath, and a governing party that cannot seem to agree upon a single thing whilst the world burns around it. Add to this celestial fireworks and a contagion in Kent, and one begins to wonder whether Saturday itself has taken leave of its senses.