Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday brings a prime minister issuing warnings he can barely enforce, a Russian warship with a flair for the dramatic, and a television personality whose news silences even this Author's sharpest quill. The digital salons, the nation's grocery bill, and a retired couple with nerves of steel all demand your attention - and this Author, for once, is quite out of breath keeping up.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Author has encountered, in a single Tuesday's dispatches, butter where it ought not to be, sixteen million customers and a government on standby, a fire laid by foreign hands, and a television greeting that has confounded an entire corporate investigation. If you believed today might pass without incident - this Author invites you, most warmly, to reconsider.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings commandos fast-roping onto oil tankers in the Channel, a most sinister tale of so-called agents who reward their clients not with riches but with bruises, and - best of all - a Canadian lynx apparently taking the air in Carmarthenshire. One's lorgnette is wholly inadequate to the occasion.