Dearest Gentle Reader, today's dispatches bring a single syllable of foreign policy, a £1.3 billion campaign of lies, and a farming scheme that vanished faster than one's composure at an Oasis ticket sale. This Author also has thoughts on black velvet jackets, pearl earrings, and what it means to inherit a situation - whether one is a prime minister or merely the recipient of a slightly damp umbrella.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings royal parallels that chill the blood, a nation's drug supply that grows more lethal by the week, and a political inheritance in North Britain that would test the most resolute of souls. There is also, if you will believe it, a crisis involving tens of thousands of stranded fridge-freezers - a sentence This Author did not expect to write, and yet here we all are.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday brings a royal war of words that not even the most accomplished diplomatist could smooth over, a billionaire whose patriotism travels no further than the Monaco border, and a government scheme that may yet place the parents in gaol while the children run free. This Author has opinions on all of it - and a great deal of barely concealed astonishment.