HAS the country gone completely barmy? As I write, almost the whole of the railway network is closed and it was like this even before the atrocious weather set in.

Of course, it is a cause for sorrow when even one person is killed in a train crash, but Railtrack's reaction to the Hatfield accident is out of all proportion. Here are the facts: since 1967 there have been 308 deaths in rail accidents. This is a rate of about ten fatalities a year. So the authorities' response to these figures is to stop nearly all the trains, thus returning the nation's transport system to what it was 200 years ago before the industrial revolution. Compare and contrast: ten deaths a year on the railways; ten deaths a day on the roads? There are 300 times as many deaths annually on the roads than on the rails. Isn't it cars that should be banned?

The truth is that the railways are very safe indeed. It is hysterical madness that expects them to be completely safe. No human activity is completely safe, and you can die of a heart attack asleep in your bed. Are we to stop going to bed, then? Human beings are very highly skilled creatures, but we are not infallible. What has to be accepted is that accidents will happen. In an imperfect world we can reduce the number of accidents to a minimum but we can't prevent them entirely.

I'm afraid the truth is that we have got used to scouting around for someone to blame every time something goes wrong; and usually the last people we think of blaming are ourselves. There is a horrible, anti-social atmosphere these days and it is getting more intense. People are running about crying not only: "Who can I blame?" but also: "Who can I sue?" The new European human rights legislation will make this a lot worse and public life will be scarred by millions of lawsuits brought out of greed; and the only people to gain from it all will be the lawyers.

We worry crazily about the wrong things. Fewer than a hundred people have died from the human form of BSE and the link between eating beef and contracting vCJD has not been proved. But again the response has been out of all proportion: kill all the cattle and destroy the farming industry. If you are so keen to worry about something, then don't worry about dying in a train smash or a plane crash. If you are a non-promiscuous, non-drug taking heterosexual, don't worry about catching AIDS. Don't worry about the prospect that your children will be kidnapped and murdered by paedophiles: the event is even less likely than that they will be killed on the railways.

If you insist on worrying about something, let me give you a few useful tips. Worry about the breakdown of your marriage: two out of every five do. Or worry about catching flu: a fifth of the population suffers a bout of flu each year. Worry about developing arthritis, or that the bank will miscalculate your personal account: it happens more often than you might think. Worry about increasing fuel tax, or indeed taxation in general. Don't worry about dying young, but worry, if you must, about getting old. If you try hard enough you can succeed in getting really stressed out worrying about worrying. That, after all, is what keeps the psychotherapists and counsellors in business. I once heard an interview with a psychiatrist. The interviewer said: "It must be a terrific bore having to listen to patients pouring out all their personal claptrap." The psychiatrist replied: "Who listens?"

The really sensible thing is to try not to worry at all. It doesn't make any difference to anything, except that it makes your life a misery. As the saying goes: you die if you worry; you die if you don't. The best advice was given to us 2,000 years ago: "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature? Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin; yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."