Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday has delivered warmth in places that least expected it - meteorological, emotional, and diplomatic - whilst serving a chill to those who perhaps deserved one. A duchess has returned, a chancellor has promised breathing space without specifying where one might sit, and fifteen creatures the size of pencil tips have, in this Author's considered view, outshone almost everyone else in the news. Do read on.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday has furnished your devoted Author with a Prime Minister making two very large arguments simultaneously, a Chancellor staring into a thirty-five billion pound abyss, and a Viscount who has apparently rewritten the entire legal framework of these islands on a single sheet of paper. There is also the small matter of a rooftop swindle so prevalent it has become the nation's most fashionable crime - and a tiger, who remains, one is relieved to report, entirely at liberty.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday has delivered plots against politicians, phantom infants conjured for revenge, and a party promising fifty thousand prison places it somehow never got around to building during fourteen years of uninterrupted governance. This Author's lorgnette has scarcely had a moment's rest - and the energy bill, she regrets to report, is rising by the hour.