Contains some nudity

Well, despite my excitement at us now being on British Summertime and us therefore having lighter evenings, when the clouds descend due to the rain, it is still pretty dark – and it makes for a rather less pleasant walk home. I shall have to speak to the weatherman and complain. I was amused the other day when I was watching the BBC London News and the weatherman said “we were going to broadcast from across the river on the South Bank but when we got there, there were naked acrobats”. Now that would have made for a rather more interesting broadcast, even if I might have choked on my dinner.

I read on the BBC News website yesterday that some researchers think that if you give people the hormone cortisol they might be more able to deal with phobias. They tested it on people who had a social phobia and some who were afraid of spiders. Now, as I have said before I am afraid of spiders and I can see two flaws with this plan.

First, don’t you think women have enough hormones pumping around their body already that make them potentially moody and unreasonable at a particular point each month. (Obviously this doesn’t apply to me, as I am sweetness and light every single day). Also, men with too many hormones might regress to being like 15 year old boys - and we all know what they get up to. So I think some more thought may need to go into this part of the research.

Second, I am scared of spiders so don’t actually want to reach a point where I can pick one up or wish to adopt it as a pet. They are horrible, spindly creatures that lurk about in the dark and then leap out at you when you least expect it. Why would I want to be on better terms with a spider if that is the kind of thing that they do? If a person acted like that, you would wisely tell me stay away, not try and make me befriend them.

So basically I am not impressed by this research and am not going to be offering to take part in any trials to test it out. Spiders are evil and I am therefore perfectly rational in my desire to rid the planet of them. Some kind of research on how to fulfil my quest to exterminate them would be a far better use of scientists’ time.