Dearest Gentle Reader, this very Sunday has delivered a prime minister who will not say whether he trusts a certain colonial president, a defence secretary who insists nobody need fear a sabre - and a party deputy whose company's donations have attracted the most unwelcome sort of scrutiny. This Author has barely had time to cool her tea before the dispatches multiplied most alarmingly.

Dearest Gentle Reader, a removal van has been spotted outside the Prime Minister's Residence, a by-election has attracted thirty-four candidates including a gentleman named Count Binface, and the Meteorological Office has promised rain - possibly. This Author has surveyed this Saturday's intelligence and found it to contain enough ambition, absurdity, and genuine grief to fill a very full dispatch indeed.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this day has furnished your devoted Author with a political resignation that may be the most theatrical since the invention of theatre, a £37 billion missile that will not be ready for several years, and news that the sea itself is running a fever. The octopus, it seems, is the only creature in these islands with a coherent strategy - and This Author has questions about Virgin Media that £28 million has not yet fully answered.