Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday has furnished This Author with a 15-metre inflatable vessel, a 70-metre medieval tapestry, and a television presenter airlifted from a Devon clifftop - and that is before one has even considered the 658 employers who apparently mislaid several million pounds of their workers' wages behind the sofa cushions. Today's column contains revelations that will astonish, amuse, and perhaps persuade you never to set foot on a muddy coastal path again.

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, this Monday brings a column that ranges from the schoolroom to the gaol cell, from the gravest of anniversaries to the most theatrical of political reshuffles. Nearly half of the Kingdom's teachers plan to quit, a rabbi speaks of a community more frightened now than on the day of the attack, and Lady Badenoch rearranges her china whilst the house debates whose dangerous prisoners these really are - yours to discover within.