Nothing but fear itself

CAPE TIMES, 13 SEPTEMBER 2002

BOO! NO, NO, wait, don’t be scared, it’s only me. Sorry, I was just fooling around. I didn’t mean to give you such a fright. Please come back. I won’t do it again, promise.

Gee, why are you so jumpy today? I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with Friday the thirteenth.

None of your medieval superstitions here, if you please. I like to think of this column as a small corner of enlightenment in the general Dark Age that is our daily lot. We are all free-thinkers round this neck of the paper. We spill salt with impunity round here. We step on cracks in the sidewalk with a song on our lips, we walk under ladders with scarcely an upward glance. I don’t remember that a black cat has ever actually crossed my path – I always seem to be heading in the same direction as the black cats I meet, which suggests that I am either doing something right or something very wrong – but if one ever did, I can confidently claim I would hardly turn a hair.

Besides, Friday the thirteenth has never been especially unlucky for me. Quite the contrary. It was a Friday the thirteenth back in 1982, I remember, when Shelley Whitfield first sent a note with Heidi Tydlesley to tell me that she liked me. Ah, first love! Nine unimaginable days of passion and bliss in the sultry Durban summer, before she left me for Steven Kenton. I still can’t shake the feeling I could have made it last longer if only I had worked up the nerve to actually speak to her … oh, but never mind that now. My point is that foolish superstitions never helped anyone.

There are people so afraid of today’s date that they refuse to leave their beds all day, which will certainly prove unlucky should the house catch fire. There are others – triskeidecaphobics, if you want the fancy word – who have a morbid fear of the number thirteen itself. It makes no sense, but phobias seldom do. There are as many phobias as there are people to be afraid. Most phobias have names – “chrematophobia”, for instance, is the unreasonable fear of money. So is “working for a newspaper”.

But there are many other phobias, far more reasonable in these troubled modern times, that do not have names. There should be a word, for instance, for:

•  the nagging fear that you have just sent a saucy SMS to the wrong number;

•  the whispering fear that everyone else is at a party to which you were not invited;

•  the gnawing fear that mullets really are coming back in fashion;

•  the choking fear that at any moment old friends from out of town might ask if they can come and stay with you for a couple of days;

•  the lingering fear that you may already have met Mr or Ms Right, but you were too busy thinking about lunch to recognise them at the time;

•  the lonely fear that you are the only man in the whole world who doesn’t see what the big deal is about Anna Kournikova;

•  the slow fear that maybe, one day, despite your best efforts and your deepest convictions, you really will die after all, just like everyone else.

No sir, it is not true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. To those with eyes to see, there are plenty of other things to worry about.