Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has furnished your devoted Author with a sacking, an ultimatum, a most consequential inquiry, a recycling catastrophe, and a mortgage rate that would make even the stoutest heart quiver. Who has been dismissed with the particular terseness of an institution hoping nobody asks further questions - and which great reform has been deposited, with ceremony, directly into the bin? All shall be revealed within.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings a dismissal so abrupt the departed gentleman had already promised to return, a financial reckoning seventeen years in the making, and diplomatic unpleasantness between old adversaries that grows more tedious by the expulsion. This Author has studied the day's affairs most carefully - and finds, as ever, that the truth is more diverting than any fiction.