I TOOK my life in my hands today. Not by scaling the Mallory Step on Everest, or even just by crossing Hull Road, but by going to the doctor’s surgery.

Strangely, nobody appeared to be wearing biological warfare suits, and there wasn’t a surgical mask in sight. Nobody looked disturbed by sitting next to one another in an enclosed space; the greatest disturbance I could spot was the look of irritation on some people’s faces at the over-loud piped R’n’B. The nurse I’d gone to see did not ask me to sit in the far corner of the room.

Maybe it’s early days, but it looked to me as though people were being British about the latest threatened pandemic.

In town, at lunchtime, people seemed as happy as ever to queue. Nobody was crossing the road to avoid oncomers, and people were still eating in cafés and restaurants, seemingly without a care for who may have cut their sandwiches or spread their bread.

It’s a tough one. There’s no doubt that if you ignore the threat of a new disease, you risk a kind of Armageddon. We all studied the Black Death at school, and most of us know about the devastating flu virus that followed the First World War.

There’s certainly no room for complacency, and yet I couldn’t help having a sneaking sense of admiration when looking at pictures snapped at airports around the world.

In Spain and elsewhere, panic-stricken passengers were coming off the plane with hankies clamped over nose and mouth; by contrast, a bunch of Brits returning from Mexico were sauntering through arrivals clutching not hankies but sombreros, and giving a cheery wave to the camera.

People are starting to become less sanguine about it, however. Colleagues are talking on corridors and wondering how to protect themselves. I’m sure the concern will heighten in the days to come: but what good does fretting really do?

It strikes me the biggest pandemic to strike the world in modern times is that of fear. Wave after wave of it rocks us every time we hear about, say, SARS, bird flu or anthrax in the post.

In incidents like these, people die. It is serious. But it is not the end of the world, in no small part because the right people are vigilant. There are those who cannot afford to be laid-back about possible global infections; they are the health professionals whose job it is to keep us as safe as can be managed.

From what I can make out, they seem to be giving sensible advice. Don’t go to Mexico if you can help it; stay at home if you have flu-like symptoms (that means proper flu, not a sniffle) and phone the doctor, who will do the rest. One day, there is no doubt, there will come a disease that will get through the net, that will cause a pandemic, just as one day all of us will somehow die of something.

Panicking about it will not change a thing, it is just as pointless as worrying about a terrorist attack or obsessing that an asteroid is due to hit the earth.

Medical and technological advances have taken away so much of the pain and struggle of human existence, at least in the western world. It’s a pity that we choose to fill the vacuum with fears about the thing we cannot change: our inevitable mortality.