Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) (13 page)

At the other end of the phobia scale are those caused by the aforementioned childhood trauma.

The
silly
ones.

These can be about anything:

Chickens, fruit, bricks, worms, top-hats, Milton Keynes, Britney Spears… anything.

In my case it just so happens to be sponges.

Don’t get me wrong, put me in a room with a sponge on the table and I’m not going to start screaming in terror and bashing up the furniture to make a crucifix. But, I will start to feel ever so slightly
anxious
after a while and will be happy to leave the room - breathing a deep sigh of relief as I do.

They’re just so
creepy
.

Take a look at one. It’s all holes and rough textures, isn’t it? You spread it apart in your hands and those holes get bigger, becoming miniature caverns leading into the heart of the monster.

Eurghh
.

I can’t touch one. It makes me shudder just thinking about it.

Look…
I’m shuddering as I write.

The irregularly shaped ones are the worst, the ones that come straight out of the ocean. All pointy and rough and ready to leap onto my face and suffocate me in seconds.

I can handle the shop bought ones. The rounded edges and tightly packed holes are a bit more bearable - but not by much.

If anyone ever plans on mugging me, they won’t have to worry about finding a hand gun or a knife. All they’ll have to do is wave a loofah in my general direction and I’ll hand over my life-savings and first-born.

To get to the bottom of this irrational fear, I asked my mother if there were any episodes in my infancy that might account for it. She racked her brains trying to think of one, but couldn’t come up with anything.

A few months later however, she remembered that when I was a small baby, I would like nothing more during a bath than to chew on whatever came nearest to hand.

My mother remembered she always had a large sponge with her at bath times and it would invariably end up in my gob at some point.

From this, I can only deduce that at some point in my mastication of the sponge I bit off a small piece and choked on it. I had obviously cleared the obstruction without my mother noticing, but the trauma had wormed its way into my subconscious, waiting to pop up in adult life and embarrass me at dinner parties.

Having some knowledge of where the problem stemmed from didn't make me less afraid of the horrid things, though.

On the contrary, I now had another thing to add to my growing catalogue of sponge-related horrors: choking to death on one.

…I’ve tried in the past to confront my fear without much success.

I once took a bath and had a small inoffensive sponge with me to test my mettle in the face of adversity. There it sat, on the edge of the bath, squatting like a malevolent purple, squishy monster - just waiting for me to turn my attention away for a second and launch at my head like that face-hugger thing in Alien.

Summoning up reserves of courage I didn’t know I had, I picked up the sponge and started to scrub my back with it.

It felt like dragging the hand of a corpse across my flesh.

Giving one of my patented ‘small girl getting her pig-tails pulled’ screams, I held the offending object away from me like it was going to explode.

Then I lobbed the sponge across the bathroom.

It flew in a spinning arc, flinging droplets of water all over the shop before coming to rest with a squidgy plop down by the radiator.

The rest of the bath was conducted using a flannel, between suspicious glances over at the slimy monster, which I’m sure was leering at me.

There it stayed.

For two weeks.

I eventually picked it up with a pair of salad tongs and dumped it in the wheelie bin. Bomb disposal experts would have recognised the expression on my face as I dropped it in and slammed the lid.

That was where my great sponge experiment ended - in defeat and despondency.

For a blissful few years I managed to avoid sponges. My life was sponge free.

Then I got married.

Unlike me, my wife had no such qualms against scraping sponges across her body and would do so at every given opportunity. This meant that the bathroom became a chamber of horrors - with sponges of every shape, hue and texture lined up like malevolent goblins on the cabinet.

My mistake was not confessing I was scared of them.

It’s just not the kind of thing you want to do, is it?

You’ve just got married and at this point your new spouse still sees you in a good light. It wouldn’t do anything for your reputation to admit you’re terrified of a bloody sponge.

So I suffered in silence and the sponges mounted up.

She seemed to go through them at an obscene rate of knots and every couple of months or so I’d be presented with a new one to kick start the nervous adrenaline.

I’d just about get used to the long blue sausage shaped one - enough to be in the same room with it anyway - and she’d swap the bloody thing out for some brown, plate-sized monstrosity that looked like a fungus blown up five hundred times under the microscope.

I did eventually pluck up the courage to tell her about my ridiculous phobia.

She managed to keep a straight face for nearly two whole minutes.

When I’d managed to impress upon her the seriousness of the matter, she started to sympathise a bit.

The sponges were shut away in her half of the bathroom cabinet, so I didn’t have to look at them. But I always felt my heartbeat rise slightly when I opened my half to get the shaving foam out.

…I’m going to move on now, as I’ve given myself the creeps.

My phobia may be pretty extreme and most of the more garden variety ones - creepy crawlies, being trapped in close spaces, etc - are perfectly understandable.

The twenty first century has given rise to a lot of phobias that didn’t exist a hundred years ago.

They revolve around things unique to the last few decades.

Fear of in-flight meals or hospital waiting lists, for instance…

The most prevalent phobia that’s appeared in the last forty years or so is technophobia.

A large number of people exist to whom the thought of having to programme the Sky Plus box in order to record House for the next six weeks is terrifying.   

And what do the technology companies of the world do, just as we do get used to something? They go and make the bloody things obsolete, that’s what!

Instead of VCRs and CD Players, we’re now faced with black, slim-line MP3 Players and blu-ray recorders - and we’re back at square one.            

The manufacturers may claim they’re simple and easy to use at the touch of a button, but that still doesn’t change the fact you have to
find
the bloody button on the remote control in the first place.

Luckily for me, I’ve been able to grasp recording TV shows to hard disk with relative ease.

The same can’t be said for computers.

I don’t know how they work
at all
.

All I know is you switch it on, wait a couple of minutes while it sorts itself out, hum along to the Windows theme as your desktop pops into view - and download porn for seven hours.

When it comes to the complicated inner workings of the machine or the complexities of software packages, I’m at a total loss.

I use a computer station at work, but I’m limited to using word processing packages, and never delve into the murky world of Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Excel.

My knowledge certainly doesn’t extend to fixing problems when they inevitably crop up.

Every time the machine so much as looks like it might be thinking of locking up, I’m on the phone to computer services faster than you can say
this program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down
.

I’ve got no idea what to do when computers rebel against their human masters and start going hay-wire.

Yes, I can sit at this desk and type a book out in Microsoft Word quite happily.

I guarantee you one thing though, if it freezes and the blue screen of death appears in front of me, I will scream, thrash around on the floor and curse the day some nerd in California invented the microchip.

It’s no wonder so many people are frightened of using computers.

All of them - along with a huge amount of other electronic equipment - are linked to the internet and many other vast, rumbling PCs across the planet. 

Because of this, there’s a scary tendency to think that at some point you might press the wrong button and shut down the Japanese National Grid.

There’s a woman at work who can't for the life of her work out how to send e-mails properly. Outlook Express makes her palms sweaty and her head pound.

She makes a real effort with it anyway, and for the most part manages to use it with a degree of success.

She did once accidentally send an e-mail to everyone in the company - some two hundred and fifty people - telling us all in great detail how she was going to buy a crotchless thong from Ann Summers, which she hoped would
get him hard for the first time in months
.           

It transpired the e-mail should only have gone to her best friend, though I doubt her husband would have been happy with the fact his wife was telling even one person about his impotency, let alone two hundred and fifty.

As a man who’d once crapped himself in public, I could relate to her embarrassment.

Fear of phones.

There’s another uniquely modern phobia.

To some poor folk, the phone sits in the hallway like a coiled snake, ready to strike - or in our handbags or jacket pockets, now mobile telephony has become a way of life.

How many times does your phone ring and its bad news on the other end?

I bet it outweighs the good calls by a hefty percentage.

Never mind that, what about the cold calls that come through just when you’ve settled into a nice bath, or are trying to do something constructive like write a book?

They’re an annoying little addition to modern life aren’t they?

Double-glazing, car insurance, home insurance, special offers and low interest loans - which sound like a good idea, until you realise you’ll still be paying the interest off ten years after you’ve died.

I had a call from a loan company a few weeks ago.

Not only was it supremely bad timing - the shark documentary had just got to a really gory bit - but it came from a guy with an Indian accent so thick I could only understand one in every ten words:

Ring ring. Ring ring.

Me: ‘Hello’

Him: ‘Is dis meester Nicharlas Spilding?’

Me: ‘What?’

Him: ‘Is dis meester Nicharlas Spilding?’

Me: (pause to digest) ‘Yes. Can I help you?’

Him: ‘I’m calling frum Quick-Loans tventy fur hoor, zir.’

Me: ‘What?’

Him: ‘Quick-Loans tventy fur hoor, zir. I am calling from dem.’

Me: (Catching on) ‘No, I don’t want a loan, thank you.’

Him: ‘Wait! Wait! I am not zelling loans! Honestly, zir. I just wunt to speek to you about an ovver zat is not a loan, zir.’

Me: (curious, despite better judgement) ‘Alright, go on then.’

Him: ‘…Rite now, Quick-Loans tventy fur hoor are offering loans at cheep cheep rates, zir!’

Click.

Give me a break.

Cold calls aren’t the only problem.

The automated phone menus are a hellish experience. You only want to ask the guy at the bank what they’re opening times are and yet you have to spend three quarters of an hour punching in numbers seemingly at random, only to reach your intended destination and find an engaged tone at the other end.

Aaargh!

Now they’ve made it even worse by having voice recognition.

This means you now stand in your hallway shouting numbers and words into the phone like a mental patient:

 ‘One!’ (wait)

‘One!’ (wait some more)

‘Three!’ (keep waiting)

‘Two!’ (pick nose)

‘Saturday!’ (wait)

‘Yes!’ (wait)

‘Four!’ (lose temper when it cuts out and you have to start again).

It’s enough to make anyone want to give up and go and live on a mountain… one equipped with a dedicated Wi-Fi router and proxy firewall.

Technophobia is virtually unavoidable when you think about it.

The more reliant we are on machines and the more we entrust the running of our lives to them, the more risk we’re taking that they’ll break down and pitch us back into the stone age.

I find this a far more believable vision of an apocalyptic future than you’ll get in movies like The Terminator or The Matrix.

These films would have us believe that the machines will become so smart that they’ll usurp us as the dominant species.

To me, this shows rather a disproportionate amount of faith in the reliability of computers.

In reality, before they’d got as far as subjugating the masses, they’d probably suffer a hardware conflict and start making quacking noises.

I think being catapulted back to the stone age is far scarier.

This Human Race Has Performed An Illegal Operation And Will Shut Down.

9.32 am

30357 Words

You may have noticed that there isn’t a phone in this study. This is deliberate.

There’s nothing like a cold call from Mr. Patel in Calcutta to put you off your creative stride.

I tend to like it as quiet and peaceful as possible when I write. That’s why you won’t find a radio in here either, be it on the desk or in a pen.

It’s also no accident I’m writing the majority of this book on a Sunday, when it’s nice and quiet. 

Well, supposed to be anyway.

The rather strange man who lives next door has just started mowing his lawn. The tinny buzzing noise you can hear is the ancient lawnmower he uses to cut around the begonias.