Dearest Gentle Reader, His Majesty the King has been distributing honours with magnificent liberality, North Britain has dissolved into tearful footballing rapture, and somewhere in Kansas City, a thief has made off with England's boots. This Author has opinions on all of it - and a particular view on one shop's attitude towards bacon that she simply cannot keep to herself.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has delivered a hurling stick, a cuckoo, and a cricket captain who apparently cannot resist a nightclub when victory is freshly won. If that is not sufficient to tempt you onwards, this Author can only suggest you may be beyond tempting - though she suspects you are not.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings a transatlantic telephone call of splendid bluntness, a defence plan as absent as good sense in certain quarters, and a kebab scandal so audacious it deserves its own chapter in the annals of culinary deception. Plus - a royal wedding to restore one's faith in the possibility of a happy ending, if one can only get past the fraudulent mutton first.