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.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Wednesday has delivered a man who will not apologise, a runway that will cost you fifteen pence before it is even built, and a travel adaptor that may well attempt to kill you. One raises one's lorgnette - and discovers the news has, once again, entirely outdone itself.