Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday delivers a reckoning of the most uncomfortable sort - institutions found wanting, laws that reward the wrong party, and a queue so long it has quite defeated a generation of young drivers. There is also a comedian weeping rather gloriously on a stage, and a naturalist turning one hundred with more grace than the entire apparatus of government. Your humble Author has read every word so that you need not face it unprepared.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday has served up masked men blockading a port in the name of protest, a community in Middlesbrough where distrust of authority runs deeper than any constabulary can easily fathom, and a foreign president rattling his sabre at 99.8 per cent of a very contented island population. Add to this a philosophical scandal in the corridors of the Reform Society, and a birthday serenade at a stadium that involved neither the birthday lady nor any effort on her part - and you will understand why This Author's pen has not rested all morning.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday brings dispatches that span continents and cross every register from the heartbreaking to the combustible - and one story in which the very earth beneath respectable houses has simply given up. This Author has set aside her sharpest wit for the occasion, though she has by no means set aside her lorgnette.