1.Waar, ik ben allergisch voor erwten:)
daar hebk een leuk artikel over:
horror of birds and beans
Some phobias seem so bizarre they are hard to take seriously but, unless they are controlled, they can ruin lives. Bryony Gordon reports
The Telegraph
Spiders don't scare Robert Mawdesley. Neither do heights, nor the dark. And flying doesn't bother him one bit. But there is one thing that fills him with dread, and causes him to retch and shake uncontrollably. Baked beans.
Mawdesley, 40, has never eaten baked beans, and says that he would have to be offered more than £10,000 just to consider consuming one. Cold beans in a can, hot beans on toast - they all send him over the edge. Just seeing a picture of them makes him feel sick, and he is not a fan of charitable individuals who bathe in them.
He avoids supermarket aisles that might be piled with tins of them, and has a particular loathing of the Heinz brand - "I think it's the colour of the can".
For Mawdesley, beans means terror, and to make matters worse, he works as a chef in a "greasy spoon" café, near his home in Eccles, serving up platefuls of bacon, sausages, eggs, fried bread - and beans.
One in five of us suffers from a phobia, and Mawdesley is not alone in having a peculiar aversion. Tonight, he features in Extreme Phobias, a documentary that explores some of the more unusual fears that can take over people's lives. His co-stars include one man who is terrified of writing in public, another who is convinced that hedgehogs are out to get him, and a lady who is so scared of buttons that she can buy clothes only with Velcro and zip fastenings.
Then there is 24-year-old Charlotte Holness, from Hackney, who is so terrified of pigeons that, at times, she is unable to leave her home.
As ridiculous as these phobias may sound, they cause enormous problems for those who are affected. "A lot of phobias can be very mild. We all know someone who dislikes spiders but is happy to Hoover them up when they come in to contact with them," says Ann Hackmann, a cognitive behavioural therapist at Oxford University. "But for some people, phobias can be quite drastic. They go out of their way to avoid their fear, and that avoidance can often be quite disabling.''
Common phobias are, says Hackmann, generally thought to be caused by pre-programming; an evolutionary development that tells people it makes sense to be afraid of snakes or spiders, for example. "But there can be a large learnt element," she says. "Someone who is bitten by a dog or stung by a bee may then develop a phobia of them. However, these memories don't always have to be real - it could be as a result of watching a television or film clip, for instance."
Holness traces her fear of feathered friends back to glimpsing a scene from the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds when she was just three, while Mawdesley recalls watching actress Ann-Margret cavort in a bath full of baked beans in the film Tommy.
Whatever the cause, both Holness and Mawdesley feel a mixture of extreme terror and disgust for their nemeses.
"I know it's silly," says Mawdesley. "I'm well aware that baked beans can't hurt me. I can't explain what it is about them. It's just that when I see them, they make me feel panicky and I want to vomit. And I don't like that feeling."
To discover the extent of his phobia, I order baked beans on toast when I visit him at work in the café. As he advances slowly to the table with my lunch, his hands are shaking so violently that I fear that the plate might go crashing to the floor. He gulps back air as he places it in front of me, and immediately runs outside.
