Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday has delivered warmth in places that least expected it - meteorological, emotional, and diplomatic - whilst serving a chill to those who perhaps deserved one. A duchess has returned, a chancellor has promised breathing space without specifying where one might sit, and fifteen creatures the size of pencil tips have, in this Author's considered view, outshone almost everyone else in the news. Do 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.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday has furnished your devoted Author with a Prime Minister making two very large arguments simultaneously, a Chancellor staring into a thirty-five billion pound abyss, and a Viscount who has apparently rewritten the entire legal framework of these islands on a single sheet of paper. There is also the small matter of a rooftop swindle so prevalent it has become the nation's most fashionable crime - and a tiger, who remains, one is relieved to report, entirely at liberty.