Michele Hanson imagines the worst ...
I have just ordered a brand new gas cooker. For a few moments I am happy. My kitchen will look smart and my cakes will rise. But wait! What if the cooker is sent to the wrong address? Or arrives late? Or never arrives at all? What if the shop I've bought it from is stiffed with crooks and I'll never get my money back and I won't be able to afford another cooker and my kitchen will always have an area of bare, crumbly brick work where the cooker ought to have been and we will have to make do with a Baby Belling forever? And what if the old cooker, which is going a bit funny, blows up before or during removal? My mother's bedroom is just above it and the sleeps in the kitchen and they could both easily die in the explosion while I'm safe out in my car and I'll never forgive myself...
These are my thoughts as I drive home after purchasing my cooker. It's called Worst Case Scenario, and I am always doing it. I probably caught if from my mother, the Anxiety Queen. In fact she's bound to be doing it while I'm driving home, or at any time while I'm driving anywhere, especially at night.
"Is she dead?" my mother will be thinking if I'm anything more than five minutes late. "She's been crushed to a pulp by a drunken lorry driver, or a mugger's wrenched open her car door at knife point and she's been attacked, robbed and goodness knows what else!" She's very good at Worst Case Scenario. We both are. Television and other media have opened our minds to limitless horrible possibilities that we could never have thought up by ourselves, even though we're both very highly skilled at imagining the worst.
It makes life rather gruelling all this worry and we don't even do it on a very grand scale. We don't imagine the end of the world, nuclear holocaust, global warming, natural catastrophes. Of course there
days when I don't worry about a thing. The sun shines, my mother, daughter and dog are all healthy and relatively cheerful. I'm not overdrawn and the builder has sworn on his life that those cracks in the wall are not subsidence. But then a horrible sense of forboding creeps up. Things are obviously too good to last. It makes me very nervous. Because it would just be my luck that when I'm really happy and want to live 'til I'm a hundred, I'm bound to be struck down by some horrible accident or illness. Why not? Other people are. When you're on a high, the only way is down. Much better to have something worrying going on. so Worst Case Scenario is almost a comfort in its own way. Things can only get better.
