I don’t like heights. I understand vertigo now. I realise it is not just girly daftness and hereby apologise to all those I have maligned in the past when I did not suffer from it.
I’m afraid I’ve taken vertigo two steps further. Firstly, not only do I not like being at a height over about four feet, I don’t like looking at tall buildings, especially skyscrapers, or bridges. Not in real life, and not even on television. The Empire State Building is over one hundred stories high. Before it was built the Eiffel Tower was the highest thing in the world. I got vertigo, on the spot, looking up at the Eiffel Tower, never mind looking down from it. I was alright about a mile away. My visual vertigo is oddly relative to the proportions of the building. If a building is a mile high, and a mile deep and a mile wide, I wouldn’t worry too much. It is when the height exceeds the width that the trouble starts. The Post Office Tower and the ones in Canada and Moscow are deadly. The worst configuration is when they are wider at the top than the bottom. Their whole purpose seems to be just to afford a narrow passage for stairs or a lift, and a wider falling off platform somewhere near the clouds.
The second phase to which I have refined Vertigo, is to get it when I read about elevated situations, especially mountaineering. The word ‘overhang’ is fatal. Climbing a slope I can understand, going up vertically, I am not happy about, but the idea of hanging on like a fly is too much. Now non-voluptuous but attractive young women clad in little more than a chalk bag, sinew their way up mountains. They should be in the boudoir or boutique, leaving the mountains to goat-like people like Richard Bonnington.
Incidentally, I regard roller coasters as simulated suicide, and Bungee jumping as attempted suicide.
What's your Phobia?
Peter
) So far I can now drive past one without trying to crash the car. Stand next to a field with a horse in it without bursting into tears and I actually fed one an apple earlier this year and although I couldn't stop shaking for hours I survived.
