Dearest Gentle Reader, the Sussexes are coming home - and this is not a drill. Also returning, with rather less fanfare, is British summer, which has apparently remembered it owes us a thunderstorm or forty. If you thought today might pass quietly, This Author has a Titanic ride in Hertfordshire that begs to differ.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings a transatlantic telephone call of splendid bluntness, a defence plan as absent as good sense in certain quarters, and a kebab scandal so audacious it deserves its own chapter in the annals of culinary deception. Plus - a royal wedding to restore one's faith in the possibility of a happy ending, if one can only get past the fraudulent mutton first.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday brings democracy to the doorstep, a Princess bound for Italy, and thirty lorries operating under cover of darkness in the Essex countryside. This Author has questions about all three - and the answers are, as ever, more diverting than one might expect.