Dearest Gentle Reader, Monday has delivered a most extraordinary assortment of intrigues - smugglers operating in plain sight with the confidence of dukes, a strike designed to prevent workers from having more leisure, and a young man from Wolverhampton who has just rewritten a century of golfing history. This Author's tea has gone cold, but she would not have missed a single dispatch for the world.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday brings a dispatch so richly stocked with folly, scandal, and civic catastrophe that this Author scarcely knows where to begin - save to say that the rivers are not safe, the energy companies are not sorry enough, and the leader of a political party has contrived not to vote in his own party's elections. Pour yourself something fortifying, and read on.