Do you know Cyprus’ biggest phobia?

Apparently, it’s crowds and open spaces: agoraphobia as it’s more commonly known. But we also have a healthy fear of spiders. And an unusually outsize proportion of the island has ombrophobia, a fear of rain.

I mention this only because I’ve recently been watching the USA Network series Monk on Netflix, in which the titular character has a list of 312 specific phobias, including lactophobia (fear of milk), chionophobia (fear of glaciers), and nyctophobia, or fear of the dark – a worry that features largely amongst residents of Greece. 

Adrian Monk lives in San Francisco, where he muddles from day to day in a cloud of aforementioned phobias, plus an unhealthy amount of OCD. None of which actually hinder him from being a brilliant detective – he’s the kind of man who sees things others don’t and puts clues together in a way that would have Poirot eating his own moustache.

And that’s just what makes this series so relatable: we all have phobias, we all have our little quirks and foibles. It’s reassuring to see this on screen; a comfort to know we may not be as wildly weird as we secretly worry we are!

Throughout eight full seasons, Monk (superbly played by Tony Shalhoub) takes us on a never-boring journey through the most intricate of mysteries, turning these personal challenges into his greatest assets. Confronting both criminals and his individual fears, the brilliant detective reminds us that our own small battles matter; that even the best of us are hampered by our own insecurities.

And even though his phobias often get in the way of solving the crime (the time he hangs in horror from a ladder while a murderer climbs straight past him; the instance in which he’s so appalled by a nudist that he almost arrests the wrong man), Monk always gets his man.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what Cyprus might achieve if we weren’t apparently all so afraid of the rain.