OF all the dread fates that the millennium is said to augur, surely, the most ludicrous is that shrinks and counsellors will be swamped by depressed and disappointed nutters who find that the prophecies of doom and disaster, the second coming of Christ, the collapse of world commerce and so forth have failed to materialise.

The therapists are, we heard this week, being told to brace themselves for a flood of let-down cult followers who find to hard to cope with the fact that January 1, 2000, has brought nought but another cold and miserable winter's day rather than the apolyptic events they believed would occur.

Yet, rather than pandering to them - no doubt, with happy pills and prolonged and expensive publicly-funded treatments of dubious value - should not these oddballs be given sharp salutary shocks of reality and be told: "You have been a gullible fool, now get a life!"

It would, I am sure, be doing them - and, expense-wise, us - a bigger favour than trying to soften the blow with "diddums" therapy

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.