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.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this very Thursday has delivered a political pantomime so perfectly constructed one suspects the actors rehearsed it. Lady Reeves endorses the man expected to demote her, Lord Trump delivers a verdict so magnificently unhelpful it proves his opponent's point entirely, and somewhere in North Britain, an entire nation squints at a statistical table with the expression of a person who has been here before and knows precisely how it ends - yet cannot quite bring themselves to look away.