Please forgive any grievous errors or inconsistencies in the following paragraphs, but, you see, the air conditioning has broken down, which means that the Guardian's Farringdon office has effectively fallen into the sun. People are lying in pools of sweat and various states of undress on the floor. It ain't pretty, nor particularly practical.

I include this prefatory disclaimer because the last thing I read before I took up my current position - supine in the drip tray of the water cooler - was that clinical psychologists at King's College, London have discovered that one in three of the population regularly entertains paranoid or suspicious thoughts that someone is out to get them. (Upon reflection, entertains is probably the wrong word but please don't worry, 33% of readers, I wasn't having an oblique dig at you.) And on the grounds that an entire third of the population cannot possibly be wrong, it made me worry that I should be more worried about averting covert hostilities.

According to the researchers, 40% of people regularly worry that others are making negative comments about them, 27% think that other people are deliberately trying to irritate them, a tenth believe someone "has it in for them" and 5% fear that there is not just one but a veritable army of conspirators out to harm them. But is this actually paranoia, or is it something else - namely, a brutally honest assessment of the average British life and office experience? Before the last of my overdilated blood vessels burst I did a little research of my own and found that, as ever, the statistics told only a small part of the story.

In fact, of that 40% who were convinced that others are muttering nasties behind their backs, 39% of them were women in changing rooms and 20% of them were correct. The other 20% had had the sense to knock out the lights, draw the curtains properly and seal the edges with a blowtorch.

Moreover, of the 27% who think that others are deliberately trying to irritate them, 50% were married, 25% were travelling on public transport, 20% were trying to return a domestic electrical appliance to Comet and 5% were watching Gil "King of the moronic aperçu when confronted with dead bodies" Grissom in CSI. All of them, therefore, were again not paranoid but wholly correct.

Of those who believe that a person or persons unknown are whetting a knife with them in mind, this is an entirely rational reaction if you are a) a politician, b) trapped in a house with Davina McCall screeching in a variety of black dresses and hair tones outside, or c) a main player in Desperate Housewives. (Chances are Nicollette Sheridan wants you dead. Although, interestingly, Teri Hatcher, for whom it is probably truest of all, does not believe this. But that is because she is so hungry that she sees everyone around her as giant cream puffs, which are hard to invest with malevolent intentions.) And together these amount to the recorded 10% of the population.

So you see, we are all a lot saner - if not safer - than you think.