It's not so ludicrous to be scared of buttons

1:47pm Friday 25th April 2008

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THERE was a story in the media this week about a lady in Waterlooville who suffers from koumpounophobia.

I am not sure who devises the names of all the new phobias recognised every year or, indeed, whether they have the approval of the Oxford Dictionary, but this is the name that the we are reliably (well, in a national newspaper?) informed describes an aversion to buttons.

Why we can't call the condition buttonophobia', I have no idea.

However, before we look askance at such a bizarre aversion, I must share with you that I have a relative who shares this phobia. She has brought up her children struggling with nausea every time she has had to deal with her children's school clothes.

It has, in fact, been suggested that the phobia could be rooted in an association with school uniform for those who found school less tolerable than the rest of us.

The zip and Velcro mercifully provided her with options for clothing for everyday use. In every other respect, my relative is as unremarkable and sane as you and I, insofar as those descriptions can accurately be applied to anyone.

An enormous number of us have phobias and aversions that others do not share and therefore find strange.

I have struggled for years to remain calm while daddy long legs, those poor aimless, inoffensive creatures, are blundering around me.

I even know when the problem started. As a fourteen year old, I accompanied my parents to the cinema to see James Stewart in Rear Window.' Being a Hitchcock film, it delivered fear and suspense without ever showing the murderer dismembering his victim.

As I lay, still terrified, in my bed that night, there were half a dozen daddy long legs dancing around in the yellow street light that spilled in across my bedroom ceiling.

I have associated them with a feeling of dread ever since but have, thank goodness, succeeded in suppressing that feeling. Having children can help.

By the time I had removed a few of the fluttering spindle-shanks from my daughter's infant bedrooms, my anxieties diminished to tolerable levels.

Clearly my fears, being based in identifiable origins, were less crippling than those others have, though that does not always apply.

So before we deride the ludicrous fears of others we should perhaps walk a mile in their shoes.

Unless, of course, we suffer from ambulophobia or podophobia.