Great news for geeks

A READER is troubled by the British Gas advert offering "unlimited" call-outs to fix your broken boiler. He says: "It doesn't say much for the quality of the plumbers they employ, does it?" He's got a point. What is the difference between unlimited call-outs and one flaming call-out after another?

FOR grammatical pedants, I am aware that the plural of call-out is probably calls-out. However, it looks stupid.

AS for those other pedants, the ones who get their kicks spotting modern items in period dramas, I'm sure we all noticed the pressed-steel manhole cover in Call the Midwife (BBC1). And, yes, it should have been cast-iron. However, as the episode in question was an unbearably poignant story played out by one actor with cerebral palsy and another with Down's Syndrome, anachronism spotting somehow seemed pretty silly. What an amazing, inspiring episode.

DAVID Miranda this week lost his High Court case claiming he had been unlawfully detained at Heathrow while carrying computer files for his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Miranda says he will appeal "and keep appealing to the end," and he probably will. A High Court case and subsequent appeals would bankrupt most folk but there always seems to be a bottomless pot of money for people fighting cases such as this. And six months after the incident, we still don't know what Miranda was doing at Heathrow in the first place. His mission was to get from Berlin to his home in Brazil. He could have taken any number of direct flights. Instead, bizarrely, he flew into one of only two countries in the world (the other being the United States) where he was likely to be detained. The flight was arranged and paid for by the Guardian. Amid all the tub-thumping about national security and press freedom, we are not being told even half of this story.

IF I were a conspiracy theorist I might think the Guardian brought Miranda to Heathrow as part of a win-win operation. If he gets nicked you have a great story about the UK authorities attacking press freedom. If he doesn't get nicked, you have a great story about tens of thousands of confidential files slipping in and out of the country under the noses of bungling cops. Gosh, what an old cynic I am.

FORTY religious leaders condemn government welfare policy and the numbers relying on food banks, and reap a rich crop of headlines ("Bishops Slam Cam Over UK's Hunger Crisis" - Daily Mirror). It is a puzzle of this cheerfully godless age of ours that we still pay attention to the views of people whose only claim to authority is being far more superstitious than the rest of us.

YOU may not know much about the Large Hadron Collider apart from the fact that it's somewhere underground in Europe and has produced more excited geeks than any physics experiment since the atom bomb. It has cost more than £10,000 million, paid for by European taxpayers (that's you and me) and has not produced a single unit of electricity or fed one hungry child. And apparently even the Large Hadron Collider is not large enough for the next range of experiments. Now we learn that scientists are planning something four times as big, encased in an 80-mile tunnel under Geneva. It will be so massively expensive that those involved in the project have been ordered not even to make a guess. This has the makings of a great sci-fi story. The boffins who bankrupted a continent.

ONE of the drawbacks of the proposed Very Much Larger Hadron Collider is where to put an estimated 10 million cubic metres of rock from the tunnel. Somerset?