Lucy Ellmann, 47, is the author of, most recently, Dot in the Universe (Bloomsbury). She is at work on a new novel about doctors.
10 Computers. How can we entrust everything to these machines which make us lose it all? I don't have email and don't use the internet. I don't need erectile tissue ads sent to me, even by friends.
9 Money. I am afraid of being humiliated by accountants who use scary words like net, capital, interest, income, taxes.
8 Bad pie. Every time I eat a pie I am afraid of the inevitable disappointment. Pies should have a lot of fruit and a thin crust; they never do.
7 Oven cleaner. I'm always terrified of getting it on myself. When I do housework I'm bruised all over. This is really the fear of being a suburban housewife. They die young, just from being at home.
6 Crowds of French and Italian teenagers, especially in Britain. I am scared of these huge groups of supercilious, fashionable, giggly, terrifying teenagers. They are miserable, looking for someone to attack.
5 Dental X-rays. It terrifies me to have someone inexpert in radiology X-raying my brain.
4 Bears. Maybe it's my ancient Russian peasant genes, because I've never encountered a bear. I dream about bears and afterwards realise that I am absolutely terrified. They are very wild and unpredictable. I don't understand them in the way I understand tigers, which seem much more human to me.
3 Doctors. They kill and hurt people with impunity. Harold Shipman is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm certainly scared of them, I don't want them anywhere near me. I've been patronised by every nurse or doctor I've met. They're not to be trusted. They're still quacks. They only pretend to know what they're doing, as they always have done.
2 British doctors. They scare me more than American doctors. Here they seem loath to think that you have any rights, probably because you're not paying. But there, the aggressive approach is scary, too: you're never supposed to die, because there's money to be made; once you're dead, only the undertakers make money. When my father was seriously ill, we considered trying to get him back to America, quick, where they would have fought the disease, but he wasn't well enough to go. So we were stuck here with the very lethargic attitude to anything terminal: they consider you to be more or less dead already.
1 Human beings. It's always scared me that you can't dissuade them from killing you. When I was a kid of about 12, practising my cello, I felt quite vulnerable, because it's very loud: you can't hear anything else when you're playing. I often fantasised that somebody was creeping up on me, a burglar or a rapist or a murderer (this was still in America), and that if I could play well enough perhaps I could charm the guy into not killing me. But the much more frightening thing would be if he's not charmable. That is when you realise there's no hope.
