I have friends whose idea of heaven – and mine of hell – is Power Ballad Night at the Electric Ballroom. They go, I don’t, and we are all happy. So I was puzzled by the five-part BBC radio programme Self orbits CERN, in which author Will Self walks the 50km route of the Large Hadron Collider that lies beneath the French-Swiss border, and essentially he spends 75 minutes telling us how much he hates the trip.