Web of fear

This is perfectly understandable; after all, you're more likely to find a spider in your garden shed than you are Osama bin Laden. Although, given the state of my spider-infested garage, it could be exactly the sort of place he'd hide out.

Obviously Messrs Blair and Bush and their Coalition of the Easily Duped have been focusing on the wrong target.

They should have ignored Osama and hunted down that pesky Spiderman.

They should have shut down the World Wide Web.

And they should have insisted that Saddam was breeding not plutonium, but tarantulas. That would have got the public on their side, and kept them there.

Still, the biggest surprise for me is that terrorism features so high on the list.

After all, back in the days when we actually had terrorist attacks in Britain, we seemed far less afraid of them than we do now.

Not to make light of the many tragedies that occurred, but the odd IRA bomb seemed a bit, well, routine to those of us untouched by such atrocities. We just stiffened our upper lips and got on with things.

These days, if you believe what you read (never a good idea unless it's in the Echo!) we are all living in terror of some fanatic with a bowl of home-made ricin.

I blame the telly - all those home improvement shows surely breed paranoia.

Most interestingly, death came only fifth in the list of fears, even though it's the only thing that's completely inescapable (although I plan never to die; after all, I can only be wrong once).

And perhaps that's the thing; we're more scared of intangible, unlikely things than we are of the mundane realities.

So here's a terrifying thought as Halloween approaches. What could be more scary than a terrorist spider?

Imagine an al-Qaeda arachnid, AK47 in two hands, grenades in the other six. In an infinite universe full of infinite possibilities, it could happen.

And it would be even scarier than a Michael Winner advert.

First published: October 15