HATING HEIGHTS

I really can’t stand heights. I never could, and, whilst things have improved since the day when I simply could not walk across a certain Swiss railway bridge when I was ten, when I ended up crawling across it on my hands and knees, desperately trying not to look through the protective mesh next to me which provided a clear view of the raging river waters far below, I really don’t think that my fear could actually be said to be all that much lessened even now. Thinking back, I suppose that it’s rather ironic that something put there to protect people from falling could be the very cause of my irrational response, but I suppose that’s what makes the “irrational” part precisely the correct term.

In many ways, since those faraway days, I have learned to love bridges in all their magnificent forms and ingenious engineering wonder and whilst I might still get a slight spinning in the head when I look up at the towers of a great suspension bridge like the Golden Gate as I cross it, I seem to be a lot better at looking down than I used to be. I still couldn’t, under any circumstances that I can think of, be one of those maintenance people who hang over the sides with a paintbrush in their hands, walk up the suspension cables or stand on the top of the towers during the inspections, and I’m truly amazed and impressed that anyone else can.

Equally, those people who hang from cradles washing the windows of skyscrapers can still cause me to feel queasy even when it’s they that are up in the air and I’m still firmly planted upon terra firma, and as for those construction workers who merrily skip from girder to girder during construction, well I truly haven’t the slightest clue as to how they do it.

I know my limits.

Once upon a time, on a day out long ago, I only had to get to within fifty feet or so of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol and I started feeling giddy and afterwards I had an entire night of visions of plummeting every time I closed my eyes which meant that I got barely a wink of sleep. I was actually feeling giddy whilst lying in my bed miles away from the actual bridge, simply because I was worrying about the possibility of falling off something that was only in my imagination.

The power of suggestion when it comes to a fear of heights, or Acrophobia if you prefer, is an intensely powerful thing. Sometimes, if I am watching a TV programme where the presenter opens a tiny door in the spire of a cathedral and steps outside, or when a helicopter flies effortlessly over the edge of a precipice, I’ve been known to fling myself to the floor and hang on tight to the carpet for all it’s worth such is the disorientating effect. I feel so foolish afterwards. It’s just like those people you hear about from the dawn of cinema who were reported as fleeing from the images of moving trains in the early Nickelodeons, but it’s an instinctive reaction.

People in glass buildings can look down at the view

Tall buildings can still cause me a slight wobble, too. I’m not so bad if the whole thing is contained with glass, but the open air, the breeze and the general sense of angst can cause me a few problems if I’m outdoors. Strangely, the effect seems less troubling if the building I’ve clambered to the top of is an old castle, perhaps because to my mind they seem more “sturdy” and “solid” or more “permanent” which is silly really as they’re actually older and probably much crumblier and more prone to collapse if you put your “rational” head on…

Did I mention that it’s an “irrational” fear, by the way…?

Even now, I really don’t think I could stay in a hotel room on the thirtieth floor, live in a penthouse, not that there’s much chance of that anyway given my lifestyle, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it much. Nor, by the way, am I ever likely to willingly stand upon Blackpool Tower’s spanking new vertiginous glass floor. Maybe I watched too many disaster movies as a kid, and the words of Steve McQueen as the Fire Chief to Paul Newman as the Architect in “The Towering Inferno” still burble away at the back of my mind: “Now, you know there's no sure way for us to fight a fire in anything over the seventh floor, but you guys just keep building 'em as high as you can…”

I think it’s just a slight sense of unease about what people, and therefore by extension, people like me, are capable of. I sometimes just fear that I might just jump, or at least feel like jumping and not be able to stop myself, but I think it’s more about worrying about being pushed, or the accidental nudge to catastrophe and oblivion, or even just a surefire self-knowledge of how bloody clumsy I can be.

It seems odd that many of the things I appreciate like massive building and construction projects and glorious engineering achievements, all those beautiful buildings, bridges and great ships and aircraft, are all things that could only have been made or built because of other people being able to clamber all over them at the kind of heights which would cause me to weep uncontrollably and hang on uselessly for dear life to anything solid. Doing any actual work whilst I was up there would have been impossible with my eyes clamped shut and all my limbs wrapped limpet like to some box girder. If it had been left to the likes of me, we’d still all be taking the long way around and living and working in bungalows.

Taking up parachuting as a hobby is most definitely off my agenda.

Strangely though, for a very short period of time about fifteen years ago, I did get rather involved in rock climbing and didn’t mind that at all, especially on the artificial climbing walls whilst attached by ropes, but shortly afterwards I was able to clamber my way along Striding Edge by keeping my “three points of contact” with the rock above the 200 ft drop below me, although I never could understand how those other people could merrily almost skip along across the tops, passing my quaking form by as if they were out on an afternoon stroll. Perhaps their inner ears are not made of the same stuff as mine are and they have never found themselves struggling to keep their balance even on the floors of their own living rooms. Free climbing though, I could never understand. It all looks so utterly dangerous to be hanging there without any safety lines, and as to those free climbers who can fling themselves from rock to rock at those almost impossible to imagine heights, well it boggles the mind.

Far enough back not to wobble

Despite being slightly better at tolerating heights in more recent years, I had a slight flashback to my own patheticness recently when I was overlooking South Stack on Anglesey. I just couldn’t bring myself to get close enough to the edge to get a proper look at the nesting birds, but, more alarmingly, watching the beloved more close to the edge also sent my stomach into churning convulsions. “Just step back… Please step back… You’re too close… Far too close…” were the only thoughts that buzzed through my head as I safely clung to a bench set safely back from the cliff side.

Perhaps some things never do really change, and no matter how much you may think and hope that they have, our fundamental fears remain with us.