I have spent most of the day saying, “I told you so!” to my mother. I cannot bloody stand Morrisons. While I’m aware that the cause of the latest chapter of E. Coli O157 Scottish edition has not yet been confirmed as Morrisons, it is not looking too good for them.

I had never heard of Morrisons until they took over Safeway. And Safeway was bad enough. I mean, as far as I could tell, the only reason you would shop at Safeway was if the other nearest supermarket was Lidl. Even then, at least Lidl don’t pretend to be classy when they’re not. It’s a bit like, “Look at us being a cheapo food shop where all the cooking instructions are not in English. Take it or leave it.”

Then along comes Morrisons, and boy, that really put Safeway into perspective. Invariably, their own-brand food tastes foul. You might say, “Serves you right for buying own brand food.” But I can eat own brand Sainsbury’s, own brand Tesco, and even own brand bloody Asda without being condemned to a yucky mouth (if you are lucky), violent diarrhoea attacks (if you moderately lucky) or death (if you are unlucky).

Even Kwik Save’s “No Frills” products were more appealing than Morrisons own brand. And I am not talking Morrisons economy or value lines. Actual own brand, I am talking about. Rancid. I have always told this to my parents, who sadly persist on going to Morrisons even though the food is foul.

I think I first noticed when I ate a pork pie. I mean, how you can eat a pork pie that is so dodgy that you can taste its dodginess is beyond me. Surely the point of pork pies is that they are disgustingly, disgracefully unhealthy. I doubt the existence of premium free range organic pork pies (although if you know of any, point me in the direction). Yet this pork pie was drier than the Sahara desert, which is just plain wrong. Actually, I think a mouthful of sand from the Sahara desert may have been preferable.

Then there are the rolls. Most supermarkets say something along the lines of, “Freshly baked today.” The label on this packet of “crusty rolls” says “Prepared for you in this store”. That is about as ominous as it gets. These rolls are less “crusty” and more “rock solid”. It tastes as though they have been “prepared for me in this store” then left out in the blazing sun to go stale for five days before someone remembered to put it out on the shelf.

One of my mother’s suggestions was that maybe it is not Morrisons’ fault, but a problem with their suppliers. But that hardly vindicates Morrisons. It just suggests that they are too cheap and / or rubbish to hook up with a supplier that can make pork pies with some moisture in.

If the source of this E. coli outbreak turns out to be Morrisons, then it will suggest that they were dealing with a meat supplier that was unable to follow the most basic of hygiene instructions. You know, like washing your hands between handling uncooked and cooked meat. Stuff that children know.

And of course I have an opinion on their logo, which is surely one of the worst known to man. Yellow and black can be a nice combination, but what is with that disgustingly ugly font? It looks like it was designed in the 1980s. The new logo is not much of an improvement. It looks like it was designed using Microsoft Word’s draw tools.

You might think I am joking, but this is a big part of what makes Morrisons unappealing to me. I mean, when the shop’s signage and products’ packaging are so ugly, it hardly gives you confidence about the quality of what’s inside. In short, Morrison’s image is old-fashioned and fusty. The food I had tasted old and fusty.

I am not all that picky when it comes to foods. Sure, I’m a bit queasy about sell by dates and the like, but I don’t mind eating cheap food. But I began to notice a pattern and it actually got to the point where I refused to eat own brand Morrisons products. This is not a joke. It is not every day you have your lifestyle choices vindicated by the top story in the news.

(NB. I do not wish to imply that I could have caught E. coli or any other gastric disease from Morrisons own brand pork pies or crusty rolls. Just that I found them so totally disgusting that I refused to eat them ever again.)

All of the national BBC Radio stations appear to be getting new logos. I had noticed that the logo for my station of choice, Radio Five Live, had completely changed at the same time as the theme music got watered down yet again (anyone else remember when it sounded punchy and authoritative?).

About time in a sense, because I can remember that Five Live had their old logo from even before I started listening to it regularly, which is a looong time. In fact, most of the BBC Radio logos are pretty damn old, as this website shows. Seven or eight years old in fact, which is good going for a logo these days (particularly one for a TV or radio station). So it was probably time for a bit of a refresh, although — as usual with these sort of things — the responses appear to have been lukewarm.

Indeed, some of the attempts at new logos are rather uninspiring. Radio 1’s has barely changed from what it had before. Meanwhile, Radio 2’s logo has been changed from the neat neon sign to the utterly dull plain 2 symbol.

But there are some signs of clever creativity. The incorporation of a bass clef into the numeral 3 for Radio 3’s logo is inspired, although it does make that numeral look slightly odd. Similarly, Radio 4’s logo cleverly has a speech mark in it, while 1Xtra incorporates a ‘play’ symbol.

BBC 7’s old logo was one of the best going, so the new version was always going to be a disappointment. It has turned out to be a greatly watered down version, although with a nod towards the old logo.

Similarly, 6 Music’s new logo is a bit like a watered down version of the old logo. I was never a fan of the old 6 Music logo. I never understood why that ‘6′ was so slanted and, well, big and fat. To represent Phill Jupitus?

BBC Asian Network’s logo is by far the jazziest. It makes me wonder why all of the other stations opted to go for more reserved, plain logos when the Asian Network can have such a colourful and vibrant one.

What I find most interesting about the new logos, though, is a point about branding in general. Firstly, the logos’ focus on numerals has effectively entailed a name change for one of the stations. The difference between ‘Radio Five Live’ and ‘Radio 5 Live’ might be subtle. But it was obviously important enough for someone to go around the website and, like a cuddly Stalin, change all instances of ‘Five Live’ to ‘5 Live’.

As such, overnight one of my tags has become irrelevant. Still, whoever it was that went around changing the website missed a couple of bits, including 5 Live’s own studios as my in-depth investigation of the website reveals! Notice also, that bbc.co.uk/5live still redirects to bbc.co.uk/fivelive. These pesky rebranding exercises are more trouble than they realise.

(Update: I have just realised that the changes on the Radio 5 Live website have even gone to the extent of writing ‘live’ with a lowercase ‘l’. What a load of arse! It is a bit like when Channel 5 changed its name to ‘five’. It just looks stupid! And it looks double stupid when some of the programmes are now called things like ‘5 live Report’ and ‘5 live Breakfast’.)

Another point is that all of the new logos contain the words ‘BBC Radio’, even when some of the station’s names do not. In other words, BBC 6 Music is not now called BBC Radio 6 Music, and BBC 7 is not now BBC Radio 7. But perhaps this is just a halfway house before going all the way to calling these radio stations.

Presumably the reason 6 Music and BBC 7 omitted the ‘Radio’ tag from their names was to emphasise the fact that you did not need to (indeed, you could not) use an old fashioned tranny to listen to them. This always irritated me, because surely there was more potential for confusion with the television channels.

I mean, the BBC used to always advertise Freeview and how you could get “eight BBC channels”. Yet the BBC have an outlet called BBC 7. Surely that is just asking for confusion. It would surely make more sense to call the radio station Radio 7 and leave the BBC X monikers to the television stations.

As the years have gone on, we have come to learn that radio is not a dirty word on the internet (or, indeed, on your DAB set). Radio is radio is radio, whether you are listening to it on the internet, as a podcast, one of those fancy-schmancy phones or, er, the radio. I mean, the internet is teeming with internet radio stations. Even I have two (courtesy of Last.fm)!

And another thing. Why haven’t the new logos incorporated the really swish ‘radio’ logo that appears on the actual BBC Radio website?

I think I have just given myself a headache over logos. Time to go back into hibernation.

I just posted this on Twitter:

Am I the only one who thinks the new London 2012 logo isn’t THAT bad?

And pretty much instantly two people, Will Howells and Chris Applegate, told me that, yes, yes I am. (Update: And Sarah…)

I mean, I don’t think it’s a great logo or anything. For a start, it took me bloody ages to work out where “2012″ was written (everywhere, illegibly, apparently).

But I like it for being bold and different. I like it for not being yet another one of those bland, anonymous, forgettable logos that usually accompany such massive events.

Imagine if we had got one of these, which is really the most likely other alternative.

Usually these logos are shocking for just how similar they are to all the others. Love hearts, scrawly handwriting, use of national symbols. I can easily imagine a London 2012 logo where, for instance the London Eye made the ‘0′ and Big Ben made the ‘1′. Thank goodness they avoided that sort of thing.

So congratulations to the London 2012 people for not just making do with some bland squiggly emblem with “London 2012″ faux-handwritten under it.

…Having said that, the “Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob” thing is… er, unfortunate.

MatGB has collected some of the reactions to the logo. At first I couldn’t see the thing about it being a Designers Republic rip-off. (It’s not as if TDR are the only people who have ever used that kind of vibrant Japanese-influenced style.)

Then I watched the video. It has to be said that one particular part of the video reminded me very strongly of an iconic TDR-designed album cover.

Update: Forgot to include this rather funny suggested logo that ended up on the BBC’s website!

Contrary to the post I wrote yesterday morning, this week is actually a very good week for me and new web-ventures! Yesterday I moved Scottish Roundup to its new home.

Now I have gone ahead and created that Twitter account for Formula 1 liveblogging. This kind of kills two birds with one stone. The obvious advantage is that I won’t now bombard non-F1 fans with mundane posts like “OMG stupid crash” or somesuch.

Regular readers may remember that a while back I toyed with the idea of setting up a separate blog for Formula 1. In the end, I decided against it. But that meant that I couldn’t use the brilliant name I thought up for that blog — vee8.

Well, the second advantage is that now I can use that name with my Twitter account. So go ahead — if you’re an F1 fan and you use Twitter, add vee8 to your friends and you can have me constantly interrupting you during the race. Woohoo!

I am very proud of the logo, which was one of the most pain-free experiences I have ever had. I realised I needed an avatar, but I hadn’t thought up a logo. Instantly I thought of an appropriate way to edit my normal avatar. Five seconds in MS Paint later, and you can see the result on the right!

Here is the real test though: Will I be able to keep up the liveblogging all season? I doubt it somehow. Inevitably real life will get in the way. But I might just get bored of it as well. Who knows though, we’ll see.

This is slightly old news, but I never spotted it until now. You know the Conservative Party’s new logo? Yeah, that ridiculous tree of scribble?

Well the Scottish Conservatives have their own version of the logo. It’s not new for the Scottish Tories to adopt a different logo to the national party’s. But the thing is, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if they weren’t standing next to each other. Essentially they are the same logo, just drawn slightly differently.

The Scottish tree is the one on the left. The Scottish tree is taller, and it is a darker shade of green. It, um, apparently also leans less to the right.

An SNP spokesman said: “Scottish voters won’t be fooled by a slightly less right leaning tree.”

Not that I would have been able to tell if I hadn’t already known.