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 Wednesday brings a Prime Minister with a curiously incomplete memory, a postal service haemorrhaging staff at a rate that would alarm even the most stoic of letter-writers, and a young man whose courage before the nation's cameras has achieved what polite petition could not. There is grief today too - of the most genuine and private kind - and This Author treats it accordingly. Steel yourself, adjust your lorgnette, and read on.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has delivered a most improbable assortment of affairs - a pound shop on the precipice, a Brexit resurrected from the very grave in which society had begged to bury it, and a celebrated songstress at war with an army of mechanical impostors. This Author has opinions on all of it, and rather a great deal of barely suppressed incredulity to share.