There's nothing to fear...

I seem to have come across dogs on public transport a few times this week. Twice on the tube and once on a bus. I don’t think it is particularly common for animals to be on public transport, or certainly not at the peak hours I normally travel at.

Anyway, on the bus on the way home last night a woman got on with a really big dog and walked to the back of the bus. The woman sitting behind me leapt out of her seat and told the woman that she was really scared of dogs. The woman totally ignored her and the now very scared woman sat back down but then moved further forward in the bus to get away from the dog and kept glancing back to see where the dog was. She really was terrified.

I can’t say that I can relate to a fear of dogs or animals generally for that matter, although if someone got on the bus with a lion then I would probably be quite scared of that. However, I do seem to have a few fears/ phobias of my own.

The only animal type one I can think of is spiders. I really hate spiders although I can tolerate them a bit more than in the past. When I was really little I woke up during the night once and there was a spider on my pillow and ever since then I have had this real fear of spiders. There is some statistic that says we eat something like three spiders each year while we are asleep, so I am right to be scared.

I can put up with money spiders but the bigger and darker spiders are the more scared I am. Once when I lived with evil landlady I found the biggest spider in the bath I have ever seen. I was that scared that I could feel myself starting to shake. I did just want to shut the door and hope it would go away but the problem with that plan was that a) the only toilet in the house was in the bathroom and b) if it disappeared, where had it gone? It might have been lurking in the shadows waiting to jump out on me. Evil landlady had just gone away for two weeks so I was kind of stuck for options.

I do actually think this is not a nice thing to have done but in the end all I could think to do was kill it with boiling water. So that’s what I did and was then left with this huge dead spider in the bath and had to try and wash it down the plug hole because I still couldn’t stand the thought of coming into contact with it. However because it had such long legs they got wrapped round the plug hole and in the end I just had to put one of those hair catcher things over the top and try and ignore it. Every time I had a shower I just kept thinking about how there was a dead spider very near my feet. I just can’t stand spiders dead or alive. Ick!

Another phobia is gold cutlery. I just really struggle to use it to eat. Sometimes they have gold cutlery in restaurants and it kind of freaks me out. I think it’s because it is quite hard to keep it really shiny and when it looks tarnished it feels like I am using dirty cutlery. In fact cutlery that it is slightly damaged or that has very short tines on the fork I also have to force myself to use and have to focus on the food instead of the implements.

I also hate walking across manhole covers. Partly that is just practical because if it is wet then they are easy to slip on. But when I was about eight, I was playing in a field and trod on a manhole cover that I didn’t realise was broken and I fell and one of my legs disappeared down the hole. Since then I have never been too keen on stepping on them.

Another phobia is of people cracking their knuckles or that thing people sometimes do when they crack each of their fingers. It makes me want to leave the room. When a friend was doing it once and I had to ask him to stop. It made me feel really uncomfortable and slightly faint.

I have a phobia about walking across railway tracks as well. I realise in many ways that is sensible. In a contest between me and a train I think it’s safe to conclude I would come off second best, but I think the root of it lies elsewhere... When I was at primary school we used to have to watch public information films like Superman teaching us the evils of smoking and learning about the Green Cross Code. One of the films we watched was about the dangers of playing on the railway tracks. My memory of it is that there were these teenagers taking a short cut along the railway tracks and they hear a train coming and go to move off the tracks and one of them drops the trainers he is carrying and the laces get stuck in the tracks. He is trying to free his football boots and the train hits him and cuts his legs off and his sister screams so much that she is unable to speak again and other really, really bad things happen. The film ends with the legless boy lying in bed and his now defunct football boots hanging on the door. Can you see why I would have this fear and have never been tempted to go on the railway tracks and think it is just plain dangerous to go anywhere near them??

Anyway, if you have various phobias you might take comfort that, hopefully, they are not as extreme as the ones here or that you are not this person. The oddest phobias have been highlighted here, although to be honest most of the ones on the site are pretty odd. I would also like to point out how brave I was linking to this site because there is actually a picture of a spider on the homepage and I had to quickly scroll back up whenever I scrolled too far down.

I had never realised there are quite so many things to fear until I looked at that site. I was particularly concerned by the person whose fear is of being shot by a spider during the night. Now I have a whole new level of things to be afraid of...