Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has furnished your devoted correspondent with a Chancellor who will not be moved, a Prime Minister who has declared war upon car park extortion, and a banking outage that left eighty million customers collectively patting their empty pockets. The details, one promises, are even more diverting than they sound - not least the matter of a Newport school bus that set out this morning with a roof and arrived without one.

Dearest Gentle Reader, today's dispatches bring a single syllable of foreign policy, a £1.3 billion campaign of lies, and a farming scheme that vanished faster than one's composure at an Oasis ticket sale. This Author also has thoughts on black velvet jackets, pearl earrings, and what it means to inherit a situation - whether one is a prime minister or merely the recipient of a slightly damp umbrella.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings word of a generation falsely maligned, of survivors still confronting their abusers in the bread aisle, and of justice that arrives - when it arrives at all - rather tardily. This Author also has urgent intelligence from Cumbria, where a man who practises his ugliest face for four hours daily has at last claimed the prize he deserves - and where a television actor discovered, perhaps unexpectedly, that celebrity counts for very little when your jaw muscles are insufficiently loosened.