Monkey Business

In the middle of what are always my busiest two weeks of the year, I'm now in a Peterborough hotel with a copy of the regional weekly newspaper where the main story is about a local woman who went to Thailand in an attempt to overcome a fear of monkeys.

Apparently, 56-year old Dee Darwell was trying to overcome a lifelong primate phobia by travelling to an area near Phuket called Monkey Island as a way of "confronting her fears". The story doesn't say whether the indigenous crab-eating Macaques could smell Dee's fear, or could just detect utter stupidity and found the temptation to mischief too hard to resist, but within minutes of her getting off the boat they attacked "like a pack of animals" (as opposed to????).
Now recovering at home after treatment for bites in a Bangkok hospital, Dee says she owes her life to the intervention of local fishermen after the other sunseekers on her boat trip fled in panic, adding that at the time she thought "This is it, I'm going to die, I'm going to be savaged".

Now personally, although psychoanalysts and motivational speakers might say that this is the way to go, I can't see that in her case it was even remotely necessary. Obviously there are many things round here that having an irrational fear of would be more than worth the effort to cure.
Fens for instance.
Or shoe shops.
But monkeys?
I've only been here for about four hours, but unless the city centre resembles a safari park on weekends, or gibbons plague the bingo, it seems to me that the best thing to do if you have a fear of monkeys and live in Peterborough is to forget all about finding a cure and not go on holiday to somewhere called Monkey Island!