Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday brings grief from the skies above Loch Lomond, a Chancellor pronouncing on runways from Bangkok of all places, a First Minister counting stars over Aberdeen, and a nurse whose definition of familial devotion runs to three-quarters of a million pounds and a campervan. Whether the nation's appetite for drama is quite equal to all of it - or whether, like the contestants of a certain castle-based entertainment, we shall simply yawn and be done with it - is a matter This Author leaves entirely to your discernment.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings a record that nobody wished to see broken, a counter-terror operation at an airbase so significant it once stood ready for the American space shuttle, and a Prime Minister with a splendid vision he would rather not explain quite yet. There is also an eleven-year-old who is already making history while the rest of us are still making tea - and that, at least, is cause for genuine delight.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday has delivered privacy violations most unseemly, a neighbourhood drowned by its own plumbing, and a runway that may arrive sometime around the next coronation - yet somehow it is a waterlogged Labrador dangling above a Yorkshire gorge that provides the day's only unambiguous triumph. This Author has opinions on all of it, and she has not spared a single one.