Peter Rhodes on missing a drone, climbing on roofs and the demise of a much-loved store

If the worst happens, I'll miss their range of paints which are cheap and cheerful and every bit as dense and smooth as some branded names costing much more. So it's: Farewell to Duck Egg, Mint Crisp, Storm Cloud, Cocoa Bean and After Hours and Moonlight White.

The more poetical among you will recognise the rhyme form in the above item from that stirring poem, Cargoes, by John Masefield. The less poetical will pop down to Wilko and snap up a few tins of emulsion while ye may.

PS: And perhaps a few packets of A4 printer paper, too. Wilko's paper was always a bargain.

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There was a time when Greenpeace was the dead-cool face of ecological protest, a sort of alternative Royal Marines, scything through the seas in inflatables to protect the whales or abseiling down a glacier to save the Arctic. In those days they spoke for the planet and for the people.

But over the past few years Greenpeace has been outflanked by younger kids on the block such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil who regard anyone outside their ranks as the enemy, to be inconvenienced and infuriated in the name of the greater good.

The result has been an ethical race to the bottom, a competition to see who can do the unkindest things, from obstructing distraught relatives on their way to hospital to clambering on to the roof of Rishi Sunak's family home.

Unless they are brain-dead, they must understand the trauma caused by such protests. Yet they do it anyway. No-one who struts about on the roof of a much-loved home, desecrating a family's sense of security in the process, has anything to say that is worth listening to.

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A Russian military blog, explaining the crippling of its warship Olenegorsky Gornyak by a Ukrainian drone, tells us: “The crew probably did not expect the attack, as a result of which they did not take measures to destroy the drone.” Yup, that would explain it. I wonder whether the full report will include the word “vodka”.