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 Thursday opens with tragedy in a Devon field, a pharmaceutical miracle twenty years in the making, and a controversy about lapel badges that threatens to consume more energy than the policies they symbolise. This Author has also noted a new arrival to the ton - unnamed, genderless, and already more mysterious than half the Cabinet.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday brings a most extraordinary harvest of intrigue - a prime minister abandoned by his own financial patrons, a cruise ship haunted by a medieval-sounding pestilence, and a princess who has reduced an entire Italian city to rapturous hand-painted signage. This Author has observed much in her time, but today's dispatches are truly something to savour.