It was a scrape but it pricked my conscience — eventually

INANIMATE objects suffering from hypochondria aren’t as much fun as humans suffering from the same condition.

Human hypochondriacs come in infinite varieties. One kind is fixated on diagnosis. Like first-year medical students, they track potential symptoms, link them to recently read features about diseases, and convince themselves they’re about to go down with something serious. They may never develop anything much in the way of illness, but they have the thrill of the possibility of developing Lyme disease or some exotic new virus.

Another kind of hypochondriac gets a genuine but small-scale illness they then escalate to something much more grave. So a cold becomes bird flu with just a frisson of double pneumonia thrown in. The desk drawers of this hypochondriac are full of painkillers and ointments, just in case, plus boxes of Elastoplast. In addition, some of them do fussy obsessive things like secretly wiping the doorknobs in their office building with gel-soaked wipes during flu season.