Dearest Gentle Reader, this Tuesday has furnished your devoted correspondent with a Chancellor who will not be moved, a Prime Minister who has declared war upon car park extortion, and a banking outage that left eighty million customers collectively patting their empty pockets. The details, one promises, are even more diverting than they sound - not least the matter of a Newport school bus that set out this morning with a roof and arrived without one.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings with it a reckoning of the most uncomfortable sort - a public inquiry's verdict upon those who looked away, a frozen carton of passata standing in for justice, and teenagers pleading with adults to take their screens away. If you had hoped the first full week of June might pass gently, This Author regrets to inform you that it has not begun that way in the slightest.