Wise before the event

There's an interesting dichotomy emerging.

Take the government's recent decision to share more information about the severity of the terrorist threat at any one time. Presumably it's been taken on the basis that a worry shared is a worry halved: they feel better, we feel a hell of a lot worse.

Then there's global warming. A new crisis brought to us by the same people who you may remember from such threats as The Millennium Bug, morbid obesity in children; liver damage in teenagers and so on.

I'm not denying global warming exists. But given that we're already expected to cope with worries about Andy Kershaw, the level of BBC repeats over Christmas, personal debt and, in my case the possible links between recorder teaching and MRSA, bird flu, blue tongue and foot and mouth, I do wonder how we're expected to cope.

As we unpack our troubles, wondering all the while if the old kit bag they came in was made in a Fair Trade cooperative or woven by 6-year olds in a back-street third-world sweat shop, we're compensating in the only way we can, by ferociously over-controlling all other aspects of life. Our children spend their afternoons counting their many chins in front of the television: so few go to playgrounds these days that they probably think monkey bars are a high energy snack.

But fear not. I have a solution. Forget post-trauma counselling. What we all need is pre-trauma counselling to help people to deal with tomorrow's traumas - today.

Why wait for a rainy day when you can conjure up grey skies right now? Why waste your time brooding about the bad things that have already happened when there are so many more terrors round the corner that are probably a whole lot worse?

Instead, it's time to share all those 'what ifs' - the little niggling worries that lurk at the corner of your brain like loose change in a piggy bank and just need a little expert help to be shaken free so they pop out of your mouth, liberated at last.

If I have my way, teams of highly trained specialists will be available at every GP surgery in the country. They'll be there for you, helping to turn your hypothetical worries into something much more tangible and terrifying and allowing you to face up to the full ramifications, before anything actually happens.

In just a few years, we'll love risk, cleave to it, search it out. We'll treat calamity as our friend, catastrophe as a second cousin once removed, global disaster as the pen of my aunt. Phrases like, "I never thought it could happen to me," will disappear from the language. We'll all know it could happen to us. But, thanks to expert help and a bare minimum of hallucinogenic drugs, we'll no longer care.

Join me in making the world a worse place - but one where nobody gives a damn.

I thank you.