The Fear

Look at it. Doesn't it look evil? It's acting all shifty, practically oozing malevolence out of its bright green pores. I bet it even watches you while you're asleep. And it's just waiting for you to let your guard down so it can exterminate you.

Of course, I've known for a long time that cucumbers are out to get us. In fact, ever since the day Edwina Currie announced that British eggs were potentially lethal, my family have never hesitated to jump to the conclusion that everything that appears on a plate in front of them is going to lead to an excruciating death. My mother took the lead in protecting us all from harm, cooking eggs until they could only be shelled with a hammer, spraying all takeaway food with a jet-wash, and chanting incantations over the Sunday roast to ward away evil spirits. But despite these preventative measures, I still worried about all of the food that we had no reason to believe could possibly harm us at all. After all, what if the bad food infiltrated the ranks of the good food and turned it against us?

When you worry about the things you shouldn't be worrying about, you realise for the first time how utterly terrifying everything is. I pitied the people going about their daily lives without even stopping to consider that Mars bars might be genetically-modified, or that Ribena may contain pesticide, or that pop-tarts might cause smallpox, or that cornflakes may have become self-aware. And of course, cucumbers were the worst of all. The way they always huddled together in the greengrocer's was a dead giveaway that they were the brains behind everything.

It was at that point I discovered what it's taken the rest of the world far too many years to latch onto; the cucumbers were plotting to take over. They'd bide their time until they could overthrow us and establish worldwide domination. But thankfully, I was ready. If I could just tell the media the whole story, I knew that they could be trusted to whip up the same kind of blind panic in the population that I experienced every single day of the week.

When disaster was finally averted, I found to my delight that my talents were suddenly in high demand. The Daily Mail wanted me to help them identify the fourteen million different things in the world that cause cancer. The Daily Star asked me to help in their ongoing quest to decide which ethnic groups were "alright", and which ones were all dirty, lazy, smelly criminals. Fox News urged me to say whatever I liked on their channel as long as I could hysterically interject the word AMERICA into sentences at periodic intervals.

Just another day in the world's oldest and most reliable growth industry: cashing in on people's fear.