It sounds like you are probably a ‘trypophobe’ – that is, someone with an irrational fear of clusters of holes or bumps, like you find on the surface of lotus seed pods, freshly frothed coffee, honeycomb, and, yes, crumpets!
This isn’t a condition that’s been officially recognised by psychiatry yet, but research has exploded in recent years, largely since a 2013 paper by two University of Essex psychologists, which described the condition and showed that it was caused by images that share a similar clustered pattern.
According to these researchers, trypophobes can experience shivers, itchiness, skin crawling and/or nausea when they look at clusters of holes, and sometimes feel panicky and like they want to scream and destroy the holes. The Essex group thinks trypophobia could be an evolutionary hangover related to the fact that some dangerous animals, such as certain snakes and frogs, have a similarly clustered pattern on their skin.
Other researchers in Japan have put forward a theory based on the idea that the condition reflects an oversensitivity to patterns that resemble various skin diseases.
Today, there are communities of trypophobes on sites such as Facebook and Reddit. These feature images that trypophobes (roughly 15 per cent of us, by some estimates) find powerfully triggering – so browse with caution.
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