A tiny blaze engulfed a small room at Telewest's offices in Edinburgh cutting off 70,000 phone customers.

According to edinburghnews.com an engineer created sparks after dropping a spanner on some batteries.

No one was hurt in the incident.

Elsewhere, Thomas S Muirhead of Hardwicke in Gloucester, has written to The Times to give his view on why Telewest is making more cash from each of its customers.

He points out that that the one-off connection charge on all Telewest phone calls has increased from 3.5 to 5p.

Writes Mr Muirhead: "This small change represents an increase of almost 43 per cent and, as far as I can tell, is not intended to reflect any increase in the quality of service. Further comment would be superfluous."

Whatever can he mean? ®