* Okay, we haven’t taken a vote and there may be no more than one – this is just me remembering something I’d intended to write way back in the Month Of Fear but forgot.
Years ago, my then-wife started getting seriously into photography. One day she was reading a new photography magazine, and she suddenly SCREAMED, absolutely 100% full force and as I looked around the magazine was hurtling across the room. Once she had calmed down enough to speak, which took a while, she told me, still shaking, that there was a photo of a spider. I knew she was scared of them, but a photo? Presumably a full page tarantula or some such… No. A photo maybe two inches high of an ordinary house spider, it turned out. So I’ll tear it out and throw it away, yes? No: tear it out and burn it to ashes. Okay. Done. Then I had to check through the magazine, page by page, to ensure they didn’t sneak a second such pic in later. The magazine then hung around on a coffee table for some days, until she finally accepted that she would never be able to so much as touch it again, let alone open it, and I threw it away. From then on, I always had to go through anything of the sort first.