Dearest Gentle Reader, the prisons are full, a pastor is mourned, and a shadow minister has announced himself to the world a full two years before anyone is required to vote. This Sunday brings grief, political theatre, and a Channel crossing gone very badly wrong - and this Author has opinions on all of it.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this day brings dispatches from the Himalayan heights, the operating theatres of tomorrow, and the Cotswolds - where a certain Duke and Duchess have rather quietly made themselves at home. There is also a blood-red moon expected before dawn on Friday, which This Author considers either a portent or a coincidence, and declines to say which.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday delivers a dispatch of such weight that this Author set down her teacup and reached, instead, for something considerably stronger. A great institution issues an apology thirty years in the making, the Royal Exchequer faces the gravest of questions about a young woman it failed, and a notorious figure in the Glasgow underworld received his morning visitors rather earlier than he might have wished - all this, and the heavens have chosen today to make their feelings about it known.