I'm standing on a petrol station forecourt, relieved to have got there because the needle says “empty”. I've stretched the pump hose over the car because this isn't my car and I've forgotten where the filler cap is located. The hose reaches. A sharp, loudspeakered female voice hits me from nowhere. I jump. I look around. A woman mouths behind a glass screen inside: “You're not allowed to pull the hose over the roof. Drive to the other side of the pumps or I won't switch on.”

Red mist. In controlled fury I replace the cap and drive off. I know that the next garage is in Darley Dale, eight miles on. I know that I probably won't make it. I know that I'm being totally irrational. I know that this will cost the cash-till fascist nothing, and may cost me half a morning trying to hitch-hike to Darley Dale and back. But I just don't care.

Do only men act this stupidly? Do we lack a gene possessed by women? I acknowledge the absence of any argument for what I'm doing, but I do it anyway.

Pennies from heaven

I noted here last week that ATMs in Colombia offer an option to donate a tiny sum to a charity, just by hitting a key. I've been on the radio twice discussing whether it would work here. Yesterday the promoters of Pennies4change sent me details of a scheme to open next year, allowing us to round up to the nearest pound - for charity - card transactions in shops. Terminals can be easily adapted, and the sponsors say that it would raise £100 million a year if 4 per cent of customers (their working assumption) obliged.

I hope it works: it ought to. But rounding up every one of a series of small purchases would cost quite a lot, and the customer may want to think about it afresh each time. The beauty of the Colombian scheme is that the pennies will always be such a tiny proportion of the overall sum demanded from the cash machine that hitting “accept” may become a habit, automatic. I'd propose 25p - at which level I reckon take-up would be closer to 50 per cent than 4.

Reclaim the night

Nights are lengthening. The march of the top-of-the- B&Q-range, Guantanamo-style, power-guzzling, motorist-dazzling, wildlife-bewildering, night-shattering exterior security lights continues. Every fourth homestead in the rural Peak District sits in the centre of a blinding white pool, screaming “burgle somebody else” - displacing crime, not reducing it. Before those pools multiply and merge into one great glaring blob where everywhere is lit up all the time, government needs to find a policy on our dash to abolish the night.

Bang to right?

Passing Geneva once, I visited CERN and saw the huge shafts, tunnels and control-rooms that dominate today's news: a weird sci-fi scene. Who now wouldn't share the general excitement? But I'm as taken with the possibility of a negative as a positive result. For much of my life, the priests of fundamental physics have been painting a speculative cosmology of big bangs, black holes, dark matter and the like, all hanging together conceptually but perhaps approaching (without quite entering) territory that the philosopher Karl Popper dubbed “pseudo-science”: explanations that are all fine and dandy, but how would we know if they're wrong? Soon we will. Crunch time approaches. A thumbs-up would be thrilling. But a thumbs-down would be truly spine-tingling.

A healthy argument

The merit yesterday of Nick Clegg's online Guardian endorsement of “co-payment” in the NHS (letting us buy for ourselves drugs that the NHS won't) is that the Liberal Democrat leader almost acknowledged the logical conclusion: a health service dismantled into core provision plus bolt-ons provided from patients' own pockets. It is an idea we should debate. What journalists and MPs should not do is rant and emote about the individual cases of dying cancer patients, as if no general principles were involved, or general principles didn't matter. In the end, they always do. Next will come insurance for co-payment drugs. Wedges have thin ends. Would we let children be removed from school for particular lessons that their parents wanted to buy elsewhere?

Downhill all the way

In case you wondered, I was lucky, freewheeling down the final hill into Darley Dale. So sucks to you, bossy forecourt supervisor. And remember, Times readers, the Mini filler cap is on the left... Or was it the right?

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