Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday has furnished your devoted Author with a village that voted to leave the Kingdom, a Prime Minister mourning his father, and a newborn whose birthplace is officially listed as a cinema. The nation's petrol prices climb, its defences waver, and somewhere in Flintshire, a small girl named Elsie Lamb will one day discover she entered the world during Harry Potter - and stole rather the better story.

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, the Sussexes are homeward bound, the Chancellor's sums do not add up, and the French have taken to slashing dinghies with knives in the name of diplomacy - today's dispatches arrive with the velocity of a runaway carriage and considerably less dignity. This Author has grave intelligence on a top-secret acting role, a brotherly rift that proximity alone cannot mend, and a national day of silence that demands we set the lorgnette aside entirely. Prepare yourself.