Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday brings a spy whose handlers found his machete habit unremarkable, a Duke turned away from his own childhood home, and a government that compared a lifetime of debt to a telephone contract - with a perfectly straight face. This Author has much to say on all counts, and very little of it is reassuring.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday delivers a reckoning from the courts, a poisoned chalice of defence spending passed between prime ministers, and the news that your energy bill has quietly grown more expensive while you slept. There is also, for those who require a restorative note of absurdity, the small matter of major retailers who cannot quite bring themselves to mention that the vehicles they are selling are banned from every road in the Kingdom.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this very Thursday has delivered a political pantomime so perfectly constructed one suspects the actors rehearsed it. Lady Reeves endorses the man expected to demote her, Lord Trump delivers a verdict so magnificently unhelpful it proves his opponent's point entirely, and somewhere in North Britain, an entire nation squints at a statistical table with the expression of a person who has been here before and knows precisely how it ends - yet cannot quite bring themselves to look away.