Shares in the water company Severn Trent are still where they started the year, and its dividend yield of 6.6 per cent is very attractive.Insurance groups also provide rich pickings for income investors, now the stock market rebound has alleviated solvency fears. The 8.3 per cent yield is too good to miss.Another unfashionable stock in the portfolio is the beleaguered supermarket J Sainsbury. The Sainsbury family's presence on the share register should safeguard the dividend and this column has argued before that a back-to-basics approach can rescue the grocer from its malaise. The depressed share price gives it a 5.5 per cent yield.Scottish and Southern Energy, which generates and distributes electricity in the UK, is one of two utility picks.

Alliance & Leicester has stuck to its knitting, is well run and has a safe dividend yielding 4.9 per cent More controversially, Lloyds TSB is included. Although there have been suggestions that weakness at its Scottish Widows life insurance business will force a dividend cut, the consensus view now is that, following overseas disposals, the divi can be maintained unless an (unlikely) acquisition opportunity comes along. Barclays has assembled a top 10 of FTSE 100 income stocks yielding, on average, 5.5 per cent.Barclays points out tantalisingly high dividends at two of its rivals. Since then, jam-today companies that do safe, boring things like pay dividends have underperformed. As optimists have pushed the market higher, the forecast annual dividend yield on the FTSE 100 has fallen from well above 4 per cent to 3.5 per cent, while interest rates on savings and bonds have started to rise.Yet that does not mean the income investor need abandon the stock market entirely, as an interesting new bulletin from Barclays Private Clients, the stockbroking arm of the high street bank, shows.

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It was back in March that investors unbattened the hatches and began to feel confident enough about the economic outlook to take on shares in riskier companies. "I have no intention of stopping work and disappearing into the woods," he said.. "No, I don't think that was the case, but I do realise there are differing opinions about that," he said.He gives up his other remaining directorship of a public company next year when he stands down as a non-executive at HSBC but will remain chairman of Pirelli UK and is also becoming chairman of Birbeck College, London University. The announcement of his retirement coincides with the appointment from December of Marks and Spencer's finance director, Alison Reed, as a non-executive director. Lord Marshall's continued chairmanship of BA has come under increased pressure as critics blamed him for its lacklustre performance and failure to pull off a transatlantic merger.Yesterday, he rejected suggestions that he had hung on too long. Most analysts are forecasting that BA will break even, at best, or make a small loss for the full year.Net debt fell a further £342m to £4.8bn and BA said it was on target for achieving its target of generating £900m from disposals by next April with £694m already raised.Mr Eddington said there was "no urgency" for BA to follow the example of Air France and KLM and proceed with a merger with its preferred European partner, Spain's Iberia.He said that the key to European airline consolidation would be the move towards negotiating landing rights on a European Union-wide basis rather than country by country and that was unlikely to be in place for a considerable time.Lord Marshall was appointed chief executive of BA in 1983 and became the executive chairman in 1993.