Guardian: Top of the pots

Vibrant colours have featured in style magazines for a number of seasons but has this transferred to the nation's homes? Are (fingers crossed) our living rooms, kitchens and toilets really sporting zesty greens, brilliant reds and jewel-bright blues, or are we (heaven forbid) still living in a blur of beige? In an effort to create a colour picture of the nation's homes, we asked leading paint companies to reveal their top-selling shades for the past year…

Top sellers

Farrow & Ball Current bestselling greys are (in no particular order) Down Pipe, Shaded White, Parma Gray, Elephant's Breath, Light Gray, Pavilion Gray and Charleston Gray. Bold colours are also gaining ground, including Incarnadine (rich crimson red), Drawing Room Blue, Pelt (deep aubergine) and Churlish Green (yellow/green).

Incarnadine, eh? Remember, you heard it here first.

Marge Simpson

The Pope

(Hat-tip to (and from) Lunartalks.)

BBC: Harman pushes discrimination plan

Equality minister Harriet Harman has set out plans to allow firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minority job candidates.

But it's not discrimination; it's positive action.

So I guess that's all right then.

I don't think grandad was a great idealist. He fought the Germans because he had to: we were at war. He was probably totally unaware of all the evil stuff the Nazi Party was up to, but he probably thought he was fighting for king and country, to preserve our way of life. A way of life which, let's face it, is worth preserving.

But one thing's for certain: grandad didn't go to war against Rommel for us to have to put up with shit like this:

Have you ever seen a dog on a beach? It's just about the most joyous sight there is. Dogs are what beaches are for.

I'm thinking of hiring an elephant, painting a Union Jack on the side, and taking it for a walk on Bridlington beach, just to make some sort of point.

Jen and I have just returned from a long weekend in Scarborough. We stayed at The Grand Hotel, which is currently undergoing a £7m refurbishment. That was our first mistake: we booked the hotel under the misapprehension that the refurbishments were complete. They aren't. That would explain the carpet-layers on the main (i.e. only) staircase, then.

What was particularly nice about staying at The Grand was how youthful it made us feel. Jen and I were the youngest guests there, to the tune of about 30 years. And the people at The Grand certainly knew their punters: there were shopmobility scooters for hire in the lobby, and the first evening's entertainment was a touring Norwegian children's brass band, followed by bingo hosted by a caller who had quite clearly lost the will to live, followed by (top of the bill!) Bernie Martyn and the Explosive Dancers. It was all very Alan Bennett.

Highlight of the trip was watching a young thrash-metal band performing at a room full of shell-shocked OAPs. A few of the male onlookers clearly thought they were back in the trenches. They had heavy metal in those days too, apparently, but it was called shrapnel.

Apparently, it will contain one catchy tune and a whole pile of over-produced fillers.

I really think it's about time they branched out a bit.

[T]he Romantic poet's richly particularised voice is largely a way of giving tongue to the transcendent. From Wordsworth to D.H. Lawrence, one speaks most persuasively when one articulates what is not oneself, whether one calls this Nature or the creative imagination, the primary processes or the dark gods. The self runs down to unfathomably anonymous roots. Men and women emerge as unique beings through a medium (call it Geist, History, Language, Culture or the Unconscious) that is implacably impersonal. What makes us what we are has no regard for us at all. At the very core of the personality, so the modern age holds, vast, anonymous processes are at work. Only through a salutary repression or oblivion of these forces can we achieve the illusion of autonomy. Anonymity is the condition of identity.

It is this bleak doctrine that Modernism will inherit, as a cult of impersonality takes over from the clapped-out Romantic ego. For Romanticism, the self and the infinite merge in the act of imaginative creation. To surrender oneself to dark, unknowable powers is to become all the more uniquely oneself. One must lose one's life in order to find it. For one strain of Modernism, by contrast, the self is displaced by the very forces which constitute it—unhoused, scooped out, decentred and dispossessed. We are no more than the anonymous bearers of myth, tradition, language or literary history. The only way the self can leave its distinctive thumb-print, from Flaubert to Joyce, is in the fastidiously distancing style by which it masks itself. Language itself may be authorless; but style, as Roland Barthes claims in Writing Degree Zero, plunges straight to the visceral depths of the self.

Yes. My sentiments exactly.

I know for a fact that seven of those bags were mine. That's 2.18%.

It seems to me that, at this rate, it's going to take an awful lot of time to save the planet.

Having said that, if and when we do finally save the planet, it seems only fair that 2.18% of it should be mine. That's 11,119,430 km².

I think I'll have Canada and Bolivia.

It'll be something stupid like that which gets me in the end, you know. Mark my words.

No, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking Richard means someone with a vague resemblance to Ilie Nastase walked right past him in Liverpool this lunchtime. But you're wrong; it really was him.

As far as I could tell, nobody else recognised him. Then he looked at me, and we smiled at each other knowingly. It was our little secret.

BBC: David Davis resigns from Commons

Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP.

He is to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency which he will fight on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit…

He told reporters outside the Commons: "I will argue in this by-election against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government."

As well as the new 42-day detention limit, Davis also cited CCTV cameras and identity cards as things that are eroding our civil liberties.

An MP with principles. Remember those? Me neither. No doubt Labour will chicken out of standing against him.

Unfortunately, he neglected to mention the smoking ban in his list of assaults on our freedoms.

Meanwhile, in related news…

BBC: No deals on 42 days, says Brown

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has firmly rejected claims he "bought" victory in a Commons vote on terror detention…

Opponents claim Mr Brown swayed the DUP with extra cash for Northern Ireland—but Mr Brown insist they voted on national security grounds.

"There were no deals," Mr Brown told a Downing Street media conference.

I wish I'd been at that press conference. I would like to have asked the following question:

"Tell me, Prime Minister, are you familiar with the phrase pants on fire?"

Finally managed to specify the options I want and proceed to the checkout, only to be told that I'm not allowed to give a delivery address other than my home address unless I first register the alternative address with my bank—which is shut. The Dell website helpfully advises me that, if I can't register alternative addresses with my bank, I could temporarily change my home address.

Yeah, like I'm that desperate to give my money to Dell.

Watch and learn.

…Or, better still, a greyhound.

(Trapped wind—geddit?)

NewsBiscuit: Smokers banned from naming or pointing at favourite brand

In further moves to discourage smoking, the Department of Health have announced a complete ban on naming your favourite brand of cigarette or pointing at them in the newsagents and tobacconists.

From now on smokers will have to perform an elaborate round of charades to express their desire to purchase a packet of cigarettes' explained Jane Shillitoe, Under Secretary of State for Health. 'For example, '20 Benson and Hedges' would involve flashing both palms twice, then doing a sounds-like hen move, then indicating a sun, then a little cross to symbolise the word 'and', and finally a mime which recreates a pair of garden hedges. We expect to reduce smoking across the population, except possibly among mime artists.'

This one is.

(I use the word star loosely.)

I couldn't help noticing that, with equally unseemly haste, said faith foundation has been awarded charitable status (registered in England, no 1123243)—hot on the heels of the delightfully named HA.SH Foundation.

I have it on very good authority that it's a job and a half getting an organisation registered as a charity in England. The question has to be asked, was Blair fast-tracked?

Or perhaps he just had a quiet word with his imaginary friend in the sky.

Kind of makes you think.

1. In the main shopping street in Liverpool: one of the local tramps dressed in an immaculate full evening suit, contentedly walking along, smoking a two-foot-long cigar.
2. At the side of the road near my house: an elderly couple walking their elderly dog. Hanging delicately from the dog's mouth, a small, knotted plastic bag with some poo in it. I assume it was the dog's own poo, but it was hard to tell.

Hoorah! That ought to do it!

The really important thing is to be seen to be doing something, no matter how ineffective and petty it might be. Change is progress. If the government isn't doing anything, then what do we need a government for?

Yes, banning cigarette logos was top of my list too, Gordon. Glad to see you're getting your priorities right. Very well done!

Liverpool yesterday.
(The red carpet was red, of course.)

The Liverpool city centre moved a significant distance further west yesterday. No, not an earthquake: phase one of the new multi-million pound Liverpool One shopping and business centre opened in the middle of the biggest building site in Europe.

I went to have a look. Even though only 20% of the complex is open so far, it's seriously impressive. It's scheduled for completion in September. Can't wait to see the result.

Hebden Bridge Times: Society to disband after 74 years

Mytholmroyd Chrysanthemum Society has disbanded after 74 years…

Former secretary for 23 years Stuart Jackson, 64, said: "I am sad to see the group go after 74 years. No one grows chrysanthemums in Mytholmroyd any more…"

They should keep it going. I love the idea of a society whose members aren't in the least bit interested in whatever it is that the society is supposed to be about.

If anyone's thinking of starting a society called The Ballet Society, specifically for people who don't go to the ballet, count me in.

I do wonder, however, how Dean Windass ever managed to cope.

The poor bastard.

For the nerds amongst you, it's run using del.icio.us, and there's an RSS feed.

Echo & the Bunnymen, Do It Clean (live):

I spotted a really cool butterfly yesterday. It looked for all the world like a dollop of bird poo. Remarkable mimicry. That's evolution for you.

This afternoon, I spoke with Stense on the phone and told her about the butterfly. I explained how I had tried to look it up in my Collins Complete British Insects book, but it hadn't been in there. I said that I was pretty confident I had discovered a species of butterfly which was entirely new to science. That being the case, I would name it after her: Lepidoptera stensonis, or something like that.

Stense said she didn't want something which looks like a dollop of bird poo naming after her. I said that some people are never bloody satisfied.

Stense needn't have worried: I later worked out that my butterfly was a female orange-tip [Anthocharis cardamines].

The female orange-tip doesn't have an orange tip. That's what threw me.

BBC: Indiana Jones is back - and on form

… Director Steven Spielberg has largely jettisoned computer generated effects (much to the chagrin of tech freak Lucas) with the result that the film's action sequences have a visceral, physical quality you rarely find in modern-day blockbusters.

My biggest fear for this film was that the CGI would take over. That's not what Indiana Jones is about. CGI is too clinical and elegant; Indiana Jones is totally inelegant (in an extremely stylish way).

Glad Spielberg put his foot down. Pity he couldn't overrule Lucas on Jar Jar Binks.

LMS Class 5MT 4-6-0 no 45407 Lancashire Fusilier in British Rail livery between Cornholme and Holme Chapel, Lancashire this afternoon.

More photos »

The simple truth is, we have a lot to thank Sweden for.

By way of a small tribute, therefore, and to make Gruts more Swede-friendly, I have now included a translate this page into Swedish facility at the bottom of the Gruts home page.

Tack, Sverige!

Couldn't we forge them with interesting people instead?

As syllables go, it's not all that unusual: consonant-vowel-consonant, easy to pronounce, not an actual word—but there's no reason on earth why it couldn't be.

Then I tried to think of words which begin with the syllable pib. I eventually came up with pibald.

I found pibald a totally unsatisfactory answer to my self-imposed challenge to find a word beginning pib_ for two reasons: (1) piebald is how I (and, I hope, most other people) would normally spell the word, and, more importantly, (2) the letters P, I, B are not pronounced as a single syllable: it's pi-bald. Like I said, totally unsatisfactory.

So I racked my brains for a while, trying to come up with another word which begins pib_. I failed.

So I've just looked in my Compact Oxford English Dictionary (the full-hit dictionary printed so small that it comes with a magnifying glass to help you read it), and here are the pib_ words listed in it:

• pibald
  already got that one!
• pibil/pibble/pible
  an obsolete spelling of pebble
• pibble-pabble
  an alteration of bibble-babble (obviously)
• pibcorn
  an obsolete word for a form of hornpipe formerly used in Wales
• pibling
  some famous writer's misspelling of pipling (the dolt!)
• piblokto
  a form of hysterical illness in Eskimo dogs (no, really!)
• pibroach/pibrach
  variations on a particular musical theme for bagpipes in the Scotch (sic) Highlands

So now I know.

I wonder why so few words begin with pib_.

(Don't get me started on beb_.)

What's the difference between a ship and a boat?
… Is it a yacht?

Sunday Times: No MMR? Then you won't start school

Children will be banned from starting school until they receive the MMR jab, under new Labour party proposals. Parents will have to provide proof their offspring have had a full range of vaccinations when they put in applications for primary schools.

You've got to hand it to this Labour government: in power for over a decade, and they're still somehow managing to dredge up new stuff to ban. Who says they lack imagination?

If you remember, back in February, I proposed a much more logical solution to this MMR nonsense.

The more observant of you—the more observant of you who are not reading this via an RSS reader at least—might have noticed that the banner across the top of the page has changed from a tasteful orange colour to a rather dramatic red. At the same time, the text has changed from black to white.

Why have I made this change? Well, exactly the same red and white colour scheme will soon be adorning my new study. The shelves, windows, skirting board and ceiling will be white, and the walls red. This exact red, in fact. For some reason, the paint manufacturer has chosen to call it incarnadine. It's a disappointing name, compared with those of some of the other reds I was tempted by: blazer, dragon's blood, volcanic splash, and something I can't remember with the word passion in the title. Even rectory red has more of a ring to it than incardanine. Didn't he star in Kung Fu in the 1970s?

Unfortunately, incarnadine turns out to be a rather specialist (for which, read expensive) paint, so the shop didn't have enough. They've had to order some more.

The new study, once it has a desk and computer will become the official new Gruts Central. So I thought I might as well change the colour scheme at the top of the page to be a bit more corporate.

I don't know how long it will last.

Makes you proud to be British.

Is it my imagination, or are there more ducks than is usual for the time of year flying about at the moment? Not significantly more, but noticeably more. Noticeable enough that, if you happened to have a website where you were prone to make observations of such a nature, you would probably mention it on the off-chance that you had actually noticed something rather profound. I admit it seems unlikely, but you never know: perhaps there's a reason why there are noticeably more ducks flying around than is usual for the time of year. Or perhaps it really is just my imagination.

They're mallards mostly, from what I can tell at the sort of distances I'm talking about. Actually, I haven't mentioned distances yet, but I'm just about to: 50 to 100 yards, approximately. They tend to be flying very fast, very low and very determinedly in a straight line, quite often in an easterly direction. I suppose they could be the same ducks going round and round, but this seems unlikely, bearing in mind how very determinedly they are flying in a straight line. Not to say impossible.

Ducks are surprisingly fast fliers. In fact, I'm pretty sure my edition of The Guinness Book of Records from some time in the 1970s said that the fastest horizontal bird flight ever measured was that of a mallard. I forget the speed. Peregrine falcons can reach faster speeds, of course, but only in a vertical stoop.

A surprising thing I've noticed about ducks' flight while I've been observing the noticeably more of them than is usual for the time of year recently is how short their wing-beats are. They're very short indeed, bearing in mind the horizontal speeds they achieve. Ducks take tiny wing-beats, but travel at great speed.

There's a lesson for us all there, I think.

I repeat:

NME: Phil Collins announces musical retirement

In case you didn't quite catch that…

NME: Phil Collins announces musical retirement

No comebacks, Phil. They're not dignified.

I'm sorry, Beeb, you'll have to give us more to go on that that. Which particular tax are you talking about?

BBC: Nuclear threat sparked tea worry

The threat of a nuclear attack on the UK in the 1950s caused concern over the supply of tea, top-secret documents which have now been released reveal.

Government officials planning food supplies said the tea situation would be "very serious" after a nuclear war.

Those were the days: a UK government actually getting its priorities right. Tea had got us through two world wars, and we were going to need reliable supplies to make it through a third.

Of course, it all started going downhill in 1938 with the invention of Nescafé. Now, we've turned into a nation of hyperactive, migrane-ridden instant coffee swillers. It was all part of a sinister American plot to destroy our empire.

More tea? Don't mind if I do!

BBC: Ofsted 'can deter would-be heads'

Ofsted inspection pressures deter talented teachers from taking on the top jobs in schools, research suggests.

A National Association of Head Teachers survey of 500 members found 86% thought the impact of Ofsted meant potential head teachers were put off applying.

Yeah, and I could have been a great ballerina, if only I'd been prepared to lose a few pounds and go through the sex-change.

Stop bloody whinging. Dealing with Ofsted inspections is part of the job of being a head teacher. You can't pick and choose which aspects of the role you want to fulfil. Managing a school requires an entirely different set of skills to overseeing a class of kids. If you don't think you've got what it takes, don't apply for the bloody job.

Simple as that.

BBC: Johnson wins London mayoral race

Boris Johnson has won the race to become the next mayor of London - ending Ken Livingstone's eight-year reign at City Hall.

Dick-wit in town… Geddit?

Suit yourselves.

(I should be a headline writer for the Sun, you know.)