JOHN DODD Surely science could come up with a Great Tummy Collider

That means calling the log man, the heating oil company, the coal merchant and the carpenter to re-set the gate that’s been blown off its hinges by the gales.

Winters north of the downs seem to be at least five degrees colder than anywhere around the coast, plus being foggier, snowier and muddier.

Apart from the main little towns, we are also gas-less, so we have to run on other sources of raw materials.

That’s what peeves me about the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss Alps.

Here they are registering the highest man-made temperatures the world has ever seen – ten million degrees, a million times hotter than the sun – and I can’t find my hot water bottle and the Rayburn stove has just gone out.

I spent half of last winter raging at my newly-installed Rayburn, a product invented for an age when I was a kid and mums wore things called pinnies, stayed at home and made cakes. They don’t seem to work for chaps in trousers who go to pubs.

I realised too, hunting everywhere, that rubber hot water bottles have been with us even longer.

They were invented by a chap called Eduard Penkala, a Croatian engineer who, among other things, lived up to the first syllable of his name by inventing the fountain pen and having a patent registered for a ballpoint one in 1906.

So hot water bottle design hasn’t changed in all that time. Which explains why, every November or so, I have to go through this same ritual of looking for a hot water bottle I last kicked out of bed sometime in February.

Why don’t hot water bottles now have a receptor ‘bleep’ signal to tell you where they are, like other modern contraptions?

And why doesn’t someone completely reinvent the damn things so that, after filling, they can be placed in a bed and then journey round it warming all the right places: Five minutes here for the small of your back, five minutes for your feet and another five where your chest most needs it?

Why can’t they be left in the bed and become self-heated again for the following night?

Stuff ions and particle collisions, what we need is something to keep our left foot alive till next spring.

All we would be doing is what royal maids performed with those bed-warmers filled with hot coals around Henry VIII’s four-poster.

With a proper timer, we could set our bottle to do a repeat turn around the block, a 3am visit to the back of the knees or a quick shimmy across the buttocks.

We could call it the Large Tummy Collider in honour of those physicists near Geneva. In the meantime, I have riddled the Rayburn, found the firelighters and kindling wood and lit it with the extra-long matches every house needs for living in the past as we do round here.