Express & Star

Kirsty Bosley: Scared of nothing, or afraid of everything?

When I tell people that I'm scared of nothing, it sounds like I'm the hardest girl ever to come out of West Bromwich.

Published

But when I say it, I mean it literally. It's not that I'm not scared of anything, it's that I'm scared of nothing.

At the moment, I've got a spider weaving a little nest in my bathroom. It's not the first time a spider (who, for reference, I've named Des'ree) has set up home here.

Last year, when all the little spider babies were born, my instant reaction was to burn my house down and move to another country. But once I saw the little spiderlings, dangling on their tiny webs, practicing life, I felt happy.

Little lives anew! I wasn't scared of them at all, and when they all went about their lives, never to return, I felt strangely sad to see them go.

A friend asked whether I was worried they'd crawl into my ears in the night and devour my brain, but I wasn't. You see, I'm scared of nothing.

The things that scare me are intangible. Like the noises that my bleepy, tinnitus ears make when I'm in bed, that regularly make me jump out of my skin.

I know it's nothing, but they send my heart beating at a speed of Dr Dre spitting raps.

Last weekend, my friend Tom and I went on a Merlin tour of London. This meant a mooch through the London Aquarium, a jaunt in the dark at the London Dungeon and a few selfies with Whoopi Goldberg in Madame Tussauds.

How I made it out of it alive, I'll never know.

The aquarium was fine and, on the whole, I was quite relaxed. Crabs make me feel a bit sick, and Tom is petrified of jellyfish. But we were well away watching stingrays eat squid and wondering why the sharks weren't eating their tank-mates.

Then we went to the Dungeon.

Oh. My. God.

I understood, as they had told us from the off, that the actors weren't going to touch us. The actors (not frightening murderers) WOULD NOT TOUCH US. The staff couldn't have been more clear that our lives weren't in danger.

Tom, the big nerd, works in the attractions industry, so he'd explained to me about haptic environments. The dungeons would smell of 'dungeon' due to something scented they pump out to enhance the experience. In the absence of such technology here, I'll tell you now: it smelled of wee. There were chairs that prodded you to make you think Sweeney Todd was behind you, poking. People would jump out of nowhere, but you weren't allowed to punch them in the nose for it.

I knew, beyond all reasonable doubt, that my life was not at risk. But unreasonably, I screamed my lungs out in that dungeon. Even though there was nothing to be scared of, I was petrified, because I'm frightened of nothing.

Perhaps, even more frighteningly, I made the mistake of reading a certain national newspaper's website this week. Only a few days after comedian-turned-revolutionary Russell Brand had criticised its owner, the paper tried to discredit Russell by posting a new sex-scandal he'd allegedly been involved in.

However, the same newspaper is also hell-bent on making us scared of our potential-terrorist-benefit-scrounging neighbours. So on the whole, we're too preoccupied with everything else to see that they're controlling our brains.

That's true horror, right there.

Sorry, we are not accepting comments on this article.