Dearest Gentle Reader, Thursday has delivered, in the space of a single afternoon, a footballing collapse of historic proportions, a political farewell conducted with surprising dignity, and a digital platform that apparently cannot tell a child from an adult. This Author has opinions on all three - and they are not, she warns you, entirely restrained.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings commandos fast-roping onto oil tankers in the Channel, a most sinister tale of so-called agents who reward their clients not with riches but with bruises, and - best of all - a Canadian lynx apparently taking the air in Carmarthenshire. One's lorgnette is wholly inadequate to the occasion.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday has delivered rather more than the customary post-bank-holiday tedium - there is a loan of breathtaking proportions, a medical miracle measured in minutes, and an act of heroism involving a shopping trolley that this Author considers the bravest thing she has encountered all year. There is also a royal announcement of the most welcome kind, and an explosion in Bristol that has so far declined to explain itself.