Dearest Gentle Reader, Monday has delivered a most extraordinary haul of intrigue - a rapper whose visa may not survive the week, a government that giveth with one hand and reduceth with the other, and physicians who have once again declined to show up for work. This Author has observations on all of it, and they are not entirely printable in polite company.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has furnished your devoted Author with a sacking, an ultimatum, a most consequential inquiry, a recycling catastrophe, and a mortgage rate that would make even the stoutest heart quiver. Who has been dismissed with the particular terseness of an institution hoping nobody asks further questions - and which great reform has been deposited, with ceremony, directly into the bin? All shall be revealed within.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has furnished This Author with enough material to last a fortnight - from veterinary surgeons who have, it seems, been charging what they pleased for rather too long, to postal workers with a most imaginative approach to the meaning of 'delivery'. And that is before we arrive at the matter of four charity ambulances reduced to smouldering ruin in the Capital in the small hours of Monday morning. Your column awaits.