Dearest Gentle Reader, this very morning brings news of a seventh prime minister since 2016 - a number that should perhaps give us all pause - as well as a hero upon a wrecked train, a former first minister preparing for televised warfare, and a marketing email so spectacularly ill-judged that This Author had to read it twice to believe it. Monday, it seems, has once again declined to disappoint.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday brings crocodiles in Cambridgeshire, a Prime Minister who refuses to depart, and a data regulator brought low by his own sense of humour - a fate This Author considers both fitting and instructive. There is also the small matter of a heatwave approaching with all the subtlety of a runaway carriage, and a political upset in Aberdeen that nobody saw coming in fifty years. One's lorgnette has rarely been so thoroughly required.