One: Plants that grow in uncontrollable ways. Which, let's face it, is all plants. I don't mind them so much when they're sitting in neat pots, all placid and unthreatening. Some of them are actually quite attractive, if you're into that kind of thing.
But I'm not fooled by the neat pots, the innocent buds. Plants cannot be trusted. Turn your back and the next thing you know they're sprawled across entire buildings, their creepy tendrils slithering through cracks in the brick and up your nose and into your brain and then you DIE.
If there is a hell, it probably consists of a darkened room showing time-lapse footage of growing plants on a permanent loop. Green alien-like things with unpronouncable Latin names seething in the mud, sprouting hideous growths and filling the screen and oh my God it's coming to get me quick run aarghlkjadfslam.
Basically, plants are vile. And if you're not a little bit scared of them, well then there's something wrong with you.
Two: Pineapples. Specifically fresh pineapples with their skin cut off to expose their horrid, ragged flesh. I'm ok with them when they're in a tin, as long as nobody tries to force me to eat any.
The fact that I don't particularly enjoy the taste of pineapple might be part of it, but I don't particularly enjoy the taste of trout either, and trout doesn't sent me into paroxysms of disgust the way pineapple does.
I've always thought my anti-pineapple stance stemmed from when my mum had cancer the first time, 13 years ago. A friend of hers suggested eating fresh pineapple to combat the bitter aftertaste of chemo. I can vividly remember my mum standing in our kitchen, her downy head bathed in light from the window, hacking away at the hapless piece of fruit with a bread knife.
It was the first time I'd ever witnessed a fresh pineapple being derobed. The sickly yellow flesh suddenly stripped bare, pocked with brown marks where its pines had been embedded. It seemed somehow indecent, distasteful. I couldn't look at it.
And that is why pineapples give me the heebie-jeebies.
OR SO I THOUGHT.
Until I discovered, thanks to a random tweet yesterday, that pineapples are not, in fact, a single fruit at all. They are a group of berries that have fused together, or "coalesced," as Wikipedia puts it. In other words, pineapples are creepy mutant plants that have grown out of control, and apparently my subconscious knew it before I did. Sinister wee bastards.
Maybe this is why I like cut flowers so much. Can't do anything to you once they're dead.
So tell me, do any of you have a phobia weirder than plants and pineapples? I for one would love to hear it. (Fin has a phobia of buttons. We make quite a pair.)
Images: Both via Pinterest and incredibly hard to chase down. I think the books were first shared via SceglierBio.com, but it's gone offline and the trail of crumbs ends there. As for the pineapple, I have no idea, but the composition makes me think it's by someone who distrusts pineapples as much as I do.
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