Book now to be bankrupted by booking fees

As you'd expect, there's a modern twist: we can order it all from the comfort of our own laptop. Although, speaking from experience, it's a beggar of a job rolling them up and shoving them in the bottle.

Truly we are spoilt for entertainment in London. From one-man semi-erotic revues based around the life of Gladstone to Russian synchronised gargling troupes, from Shakespeare performed on manatees to an ever-changing collection of women off the telly you've never even wanted to mentally undress actually undressing while singing, it's all there. You should take advantage.

One piece of advice, though: make sure you book tickets at least three months in advance. This is not because these things all sell out - they don't -but three months ought to be just long enough for you to save up the money for a bus to get there after you've taken the massive hit that is the booking fees.

This weekend I went online to organise my biennial treat of a night out to see Billy Connolly.

The tickets were £30 each which, considering the man regularly performs for three hours and more, seemed entirely reasonable. I clicked on "Book Tickets" and reached for my credit card to seal the deal.

Not so fast, bucko. The Leading But Unnamed Ticket Agency website then demanded I pay it £4.75 per ticket by way of a booking fee. £4.75? It's so exact, isn't it? It can't possibly be an arbitrary but extortionate made-up figure.

Those tickets that come through the post may look like they've been spewed out in a microsecond by a relatively cheap printer, but no.

Don't be fooled; they are hand-calligraphed by specially head-hunted leprechauns who have to undergo a seven-year apprenticeship.

The paper on which they ply their craft is made from trees which only grow in the lowlands of Bhutan and which, due to their extraordinary physical properties, can only be transported if entirely cushioned in silk.

Obviously I don't know for sure that this is true, it's just that for £4.75 it's got to be something like that, hasn't it?

So I clicked "Accept", ready to cough up. Before I could, the site raised the subject of how I'd like to get hold of these tickets. Did I want them sending by regular post at a cost of £2.25, it wanted to know. £2.25?

What regular post is that? I expect the site is operated from some years in the future when the price of a first-class stamp is five-and-a-half times what it is now.

At any rate I thought that it might be better to take the option of having them emailed to me so that I could print them out myself. OK, the site then informed me, that will also be £2.25.

Eh? To print them out myself? Why? Are they going to send the paper round for me to do it on? It'd probably be best - I've got a bit of a shortage of perforated, hologram-bedecked paper at the moment.

Anyway, look, long story short: I'm a bit strapped for cash now. So, anyone want to buy two Billy Connolly tickets?

Don't knock the Collider

I love the Large Hadron Collider. I really do, and when they add a log flume and open it to the public, I'll be first in the queue.

Alas the LHC, as it is known by aficionados and those trying to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury alike, has become something of a byword for scientific failure and waste.

It seems to me that this is vastly unfair. I am not of an especially scientific bent but even I can see that the press and public are judging it in the wrong terms.

Certainly it cost a lot to build but that reflects the scale of the ambition of the project: to discover the origins of the universe by actually recreating the conditions and events just after it occurred.

Everybody jeered when the LHC broke down so quickly but really, they're learning as they go; no one's ever made a God Machine before.

Except for Blofeld, sundry Warner Brothers characters and Michael Howard, obviously, but they're all fictional.

So now that the LHC is ready slowly to begin running again, let's all just let its staff get on with it.

Should they succeed, human knowledge will be massively advanced. For one-16th of the cost so far of the Afghan war. That's a bargain, surely.

Vertigo is back on the London menu

Plans have been announced to reopen the restaurant at the top of the BT Tower. That's what's been missing from the London dining scene: the opportunity to feel both seasick and vertiginous while dining.

Not to mention the added frisson of wondering what would happen if someone accidentally leaned on the speed control lever and rendered the whole thing a massive sky-bound centrifuge.

It'd be like a posh version of those Cubs eating their lunch on that rollercoaster on Jim'll Fix It. Hmmm. So very tempting. Must remember to book.