Anxiety about swine flu has been increased by our hubristic attitude that we can control all. There is a new fear abroad in the world: the expected epidemic of swine flu.

I know someone who has it. She rang me up the other night. “Oh, I feel rotten — I've got swine flu.” But apart from feeling rotten, taking a paracetamol and staying at home, it didn't sound all that disastrous. She was still able to gossip cheerfully for the next half-hour.

While mild cases are spreading — Cherie Blair is one of the current victims — widespread alarm is spreading too. Can doctors and health services cope in the event of a serious pandemic?

Businesses are making elaborate arrangements in case large numbers of their staff go down with the virus.

Big supermarkets such as Sainsbury's and Tesco are putting in place a doomsday scenario in the event of 10%, or even 20%, of their employees being knocked out by a pandemic.

For, although the swine flu strain is — in the main — mild enough at the moment, it could mutate into something more deadly.

Come the autumn, and especially when the schools return after their summer holiday, the demand for the anti-viral drug Tamiflu will be huge; and as it hits young people between the ages of 5 and 15 hardest, they will be the group given priority.

Should we all be worried? I certainly do feel concerned, especially on behalf of the younger people in the family. Mature folk seem to have built up enough antibodies to fend off an attack.

But at the same time, anxiety and even panic are probably increased by our hubristic modern attitude that we can control everything, that there is a pill for every ill, and that we even have ‘rights’ over our bodies.

Maybe this is the time when we should draw on older wisdoms and accept the fact that life really is full of risks and hazards, and you cannot control every aspect of existence.

Many contemporary ideas feed into the notion that we can ‘control’ all aspects of life, from our own individual destiny to the weather in the streets. One of these is the deification of ‘choice’ in everything.

We are supposed to sail through life exercising our ‘choices’ at every turn: and there is a growing movement now that we should exercise our ‘choice’ when it comes to death, by choosing our own death at a time and a place of our own convenience.

When the conductor Edward Downes and his wife Joan took the decision to go to Switzerland and die together in a suicide pact, commentators applauded their decision on the grounds that the Downes had “taken control” of their own destiny in ending their lives.

This is a slight misreading of the situation: Lady Downes was terminally ill. She hadn't exercised the ‘choice’ to get cancer, and she had not been successful in “controlling” it.

To enter into a suicide pact — albeit in compassionate circumstances — is a gesture of accepting defeat, not of “controlling” our lives.

The claims of ‘choice’ and ‘control’ constantly imply that we have rights over our own bodies. But as Germaine Greer once so memorably said: “If we had rights over our own bodies, we would have the right not to get cancer.”

The compensation culture has also fed into the notion that human beings are somehow in control of every event.

If something goes wrong, there is often litigation for compensation.

But sometimes things just go wrong; as they say, ‘stuff happens’, and it isn't always someone's fault, or even within human control.

People can suddenly lose their lives in the blink of an eye; we read of such casual tragedies every day.

A grandfather drives his grandson home on a summer's afternoon and is killed in an horrific road collision.

A man goes out fishing with his boy, and is swept away.

A man is injured after a wall collapse; a lad is sucked into a drain when probing a swimming-pool grill for his goggles.

Things happen that we can never prevent nor control.

Sometimes there are causal reasons for mishaps: an individual may lose his life because his sailing equipment is faulty, a woman may drown in her own bath after imbibing too much wine, a road accident may be caused by speed or careless driving.

But there are still many tragedies that occur either from bad luck, or what Eastern philosophies have called ‘Kismet’ — it is your fate.

Western thinking has always rejected this ‘Kismet’ hypothesis as being too passive.

Western mentalities were generally more pro-active, more dynamic, more about the individual ‘taking charge’ of his own circumstances, seeking the cause of a problem and applying the logical remedy.

This is all fine and dandy, but with limitations. There comes a time when it may bring more peace of mind to accept that there are some things we cannot control.

We can prudently try to minimise risk — one microbiologist says the best way to reduce swine flu is to ban tea-towels, which carry more bacteria than any other known item — but we must also accept that we may not necessarily be able to control every aspect of the epidemic. So what's the point of worrying?