The above event occurred last Saturday in Ponsonby, a pity as architecturally it was an elegant building.

Every morning for half a century, receiving my natural human right of breakfast in bed, a morning ritual wherever we are, my partner lays everything out on the side table, and hands me the morning paper.

And as always in Wellington, I first glance at the front page to see what trifle (usually a local body matter) the Dominion-Post is beating up into a fictitious story, before going to page two to do the Telegraph crossword. When that’s finished, it’s on to the back pages to do the two word game challenges, followed by the quite good crossword. Finally, to the obituaries to check I’m not there.

The above is how a prominent Wellington commercial figure described the insanity last Tuesday by Stuff’s dying fleet of newspapers.

I shall write about this next Monday by which time the on-going reaction will have slowed. But in the interim I offer Stuff’s management a wager.

Imaginative barristers continue to entertain with their arguments on behalf of clients facing off-beat, usually sexual offences.

Last week, reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, first published 202 years ago, I encountered the following passage about the heroine Catherine’s sister Sally.