Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday has delivered electoral carnage of the most spectacular variety, a nautical health scare that even the most imaginative novelist could not have contrived, and the most joyous centenary this Author has had the privilege of recording. Pull up a chair, for the tea is already cold and the scandal is piping hot.

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.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday brings a most remarkable assortment of affairs - legislation slipped quietly past sleeping parliamentarians, school kitchens stripped of their guilty pleasures, and a gentleman from the Northern Province who has just done something in the golfing world that only three men before him have ever managed. This Author has opinions on all of it, and very little patience for those who do not.