Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday brings a state apology decades in the making, a convicted people smuggler discovered living most comfortably in Leicestershire, and a defence spending plan with a rather conspicuous hole in its pocket. This Author has notes - and, for once, not all of them are amusing.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday delivers a reckoning from the courts, a poisoned chalice of defence spending passed between prime ministers, and the news that your energy bill has quietly grown more expensive while you slept. There is also, for those who require a restorative note of absurdity, the small matter of major retailers who cannot quite bring themselves to mention that the vehicles they are selling are banned from every road in the Kingdom.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday brings a sentencing scandal that has endured far too long, a maternity inquiry that found rather more embedded disgrace than the establishment would prefer, and a political speech so carefully unpinned from detail that one scarcely knows whether to applaud or merely ask a follow-up question. There is also, naturally, more heat on the horizon - and a doorbell camera that has done more for justice this season than many a magistrate.