“Fiddling around with fear is a delicate business”

AROUND the time she’s getting ready for bed, my teenage daughter, our late night alarm call (repeat on nightly loop), screams.

It has the same galvanising quality as the scream that someone whose leg is being sawn off might emit. She quivers in the corner of her bedroom, gesticulating wildly at a spider the size of an atom.

So I look up phobias. ‘A phobia is an irrational, intense and persistent fear of something, accompanied by an unreasonable desire to avoid the stimulus. When the fear is interfering with daily life, a diagnosis of phobia can be made.’ Her fear is interfering with our lives by default; my husband and I now have spider-removal fights. Each furiously resents having to stumble out of bed and chase a spider they can’t see around a room. To pre-empt my husband implementing a ‘face the fear’ strategy for my daughter (this approach is often posited by people like my husband who aren’t afraid of anything), I buy a spider plug and explain the dubious science. I haven’t heard a scream since.