Dearest Gentle Reader, this Saturday brings a catalogue of institutional failings so remarkable one scarcely knows whether to reach for the smelling salts or the petition paper. Two women lost, a politician's letterbox revisited, a famous marriage quietly dissolved - and, for those who prefer their scandals microscopic, a tale from a Cambridge hotel room that will quite put you off economy lodgings for life.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday brings a bitten constable in Norfolk, a World Cup footballer who is apparently shocked - quite shocked - to find himself charged with assault, and a man in Coleraine brought low by a measurement of ten centimetres. This Author has raised both eyebrows and cannot promise to lower them before luncheon.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings mountains that have claimed the irreplaceable, an undertaker whose betrayal of the bereaved beggars belief, and a ballot paper so long it has made the very polling tables inadequate - and that is before we reach the national park that has sold its own name for the price of an electric motor car. Your lorgnette will be quite exhausted by the end.