Be honest, now - which do you find the scarier prospect: lying in a perspex coffin filled with hungry rats while milk is spritzed on your face and tasty morsels of cheese are secreted in delicate locations around your person, or spending half an hour locked in the same house as Ilse-Mari from Big Brother 2? Personally, I would take my chances with the rats, but that's just me. At least after being eaten by rats, I would still be able to respect myself the next morning.

The producers of Fear Factor (M-Net; Saturdays) have hashed up some pretty spooky stunts for our viewing pleasure. Each week the contestants on the show get put through a variety of predicaments so ghastly they would have Edgar Allan Poe blanching and shuddering and switching off the television set and gasping "Nevermore!"

Besides the rats and the heights and the ever-popular eating-live-cockroaches gag, my personal horror was the prank in which contestants are required to bob for apples in a glass bowl filled with live water serpents. How much do I hate the idea of putting my face in a glass bowl filled with live water serpents?

Let me put it this way: if I were placed in a room with a glass bowl filled with live water serpents, and Ilse-Mari from Big Brother 2, and told to make a choice or otherwise the world would blow up (which seemed to strike us as a very plausible scenario when we were kids, idly speculating on the worse of two bad options), I would be nibbling on those handlebar ears and whispering sweet nothings to join the other sweet nothings inside those ears, before you could say, "Oh no, they are playing Ferdinand's new song again."

Seriously, now - there is something to strike fear and loathing into the heart of decent folk everywhere. Have you seen those adverts? They leave me without the power of speech. That infernal dunderhead Ferdinand, who bored his way to the end of the first Big Brother like a weevil through an especially unpalatable ship's biscuit, has released a song, and the adverts for the song are taking up perfectly good advertising airtime that might more usefully have been dedicated to promoting Helmut Lotti's tribute to Barbra Streisand, or the world's smallest sanitary pad, or some such equivalent atrocity. (There actually is an advert at the moment for the world's smallest sanitary pad, by the way. I wasn't referring to Helmut Lotti.)

The song is called Wakka Wakka and - not to give away too many lyrical secrets or anything - the chorus features some cretin I can only assume to be Ferdinand repeating the words "wakka wakka" in a conspiratorial fashion. "Wakka wakka," says Ferdinand, and then "Wakka wakka". He teases the meaning out of these lines for several more minutes, during which time if you shut your eyes you can actually see beefy men with moustaches clutching crumpled beer cans and braai tongs and slapping their bellies while they sing along in a small suburban backyard with long grass and patches of dirt and scattered bits of old metal. "Wakka wakka!" they sing along with Ferdi. "Wakka wakka!"

Without meaning to belabour the point, I am compelled to report that Ferdinand repeats his message several times more, then rounds off this musical expedition through his mind with the observation, "Wakka wakka". I have actually listened to the song - which may be why recently I have been having trouble remembering my own telephone number and walking in a straight line without toppling over - and the best thing I can say about it is that it beats bobbing for apples in a glass bowl filled with live water serpents.

I find Fear Factor such an effective show, I realised, because I am so genuinely scared of so many things. They wouldn't need to make me eat tapeworms and dung-beetles on that show. Just order at random from an all-Chinese menu, or anything from the list of specials in an authentic Austrian restaurant, and I will be under the table, whimpering and picking off the pieces of dried old chewing gum for purposes of nourishment. Yes indeed, I am scared of many things. Sausages, for instance, or being seated next to a contemporary artist at a dinner party, or dying and discovering that the Buddhists were right and I have to go through high school all over again. (I had a dream the other night, incidentally, in which I arrived at the Pearly Gates in time to hear St Peter saying to the party ahead of me: "No, no, it's not cleanliness that's next to godliness, you schmucks. It's golf!" But I am not overly concerned about that just yet.)

At any rate, I have stopped myself thinking about fear. The more you think about fear, the more fearful you become, and I am leaving all that behind for a short while. Times have been hard in the Hot Medium household just of late and I am feeling a little worn and weary. No, do not sob for me. I have a remedy. For fear of breaking down entirely and gibbering away in these pages about, oh, I don't know, Ilse-Mari's ears and Ferdinand's new song and peculiar ecclesiastical dreams, I have decided to take myself off for a brief vacation. I shan't be here next week - I shall be in bleached, isolated splendour upon the vast and distant Skeleton Coast in the northern reaches of Namibia, a place where scuffle the ragged desert elephants and creak the wrecks of ancient ships and whistle the lonely winds through the high and heartless dunes, and where nary another human will darken the landscape with their voices and hairstyles and bad ideas.

I shall drink of the solitude, as someone or other once said, and return revived and with new ideas. In two weeks I shall be back, if you will have me.