Blogs

So the bloodbath continues. Last Saturday's Guardian business pages featured a very interesting little series of graphs, showing just how far major shares had fallen in the past few months. They included some of our old favourites: Persimmon, Barratt, Kier, Taylor Wimpey and, of course, Wolseley. For all of these companies have seen upwards of…

So we're in a recession. Well someone ought to tell the hotel industry. Especially those ones in close proximity to popular destinations. Like the NEC.

The papers and TV screens may be full of happy, cheerful children, making the most of the school closures by speeding down snow covered hills on make-shift toboggans but they also showed something slightly darker and a little more worrying.

A mark of a civilised society must surely be that it houses its citizens in decent dwellings.

This week's winner of the 'stuff that's so obvious it hurts' award is the news story from that redoubtable organisation the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that the Government is unlikely to reach its own target of three million homes by 2020.

Ouch. As if things weren't bad enough as it is at Build Center, what with the recession and everything, now the merchant has two years to prove itself or get hived off.

What a balls-up. Or, since it happened under the new incumbent, what a Gove-up. I'm referring, of course, to the fiasco that was the announcement of the slashing of the Building Schools for the Future programme.

So today we have one builders merchant group less than we had yesterday.

On August 16 1977 I woke up to the news that Elvis Presley had died.

I was talking to a chap who sells cement the other day, as you do. And what he said worried me.