In truth, the condition can be restrictive. Acute muscle tensing does occur. Concentration and breathing, usually performed with blasé indifference, suddenly become unfamiliarly difficult. You require instructions to breath. Over-breathing triggers dizziness. A growing unbalance vibrates through your spine like an approaching tube train. Fear pounces from nowhere out of the darkened shadows of your subconscious mind and stages a coup d’état on the functioning conscious brain. Dizziness can quickly consume a victim. Heart rate soars upwards. Anxiety dials lurch to the far right. Needles flicker into red zones registering alarm. Internal klaxons sound. This combination is ubiquitously and incorrectly known as vertigo. If there’s one place where you don’t want to experience these symptoms then it’s surely at a great height.
Hence the condition tends to manifest itself in an acute avoidance of heights. This is surprisingly problematic. I would prefer to be an avoider of snakes, and this isn’t particularly restrictive within an increasingly urbanised lifestyle. But heights are my particular greatest fear, which would give the sadists of Room 101 a problem as the room number indicates that the locale of the ultimate Orwellian fear is only on the first floor.
Suffering from acute acrophobia does inevitably incur a block on entering certain professions. Any lingering dreams of becoming a steeplejack by the time you reach thirty are destined to remain unfulfilled through the passing decades, though even non-acrophobes tend to secretly agree that being a steeplejack is INSANE!
And beware, people who currently consider themselves comfortable with heights - or who are, as I prefer to express it, arrogant at altitude. Novelist Kim Curran, author of successful books Shift and Control (I assume her next novels will be titled Alt and Delete?), confided in me: “I thought I was fine with heights until I went up a crumbling ziggurat in Mexico called Ek’ Balam. It’s over a hundred feet high, no ropes to steady yourself and the steepest incline I’ve ever known. I made the mistake of looking down and... well, I had to descend on my backside, with my eyes closed. Hardly Lara Croft.”
So there lies an unpalatable truth: even the safest cyclist with a high visibility bib, helmet and reflector can encounter the juggernaut of acrophobia unexpectedly swerving into the cycle lane.
Poet Sophie Clarke, winner of the Miracle Poetry Competition in 2013 with a poem inspired by her height anxiety, recognises my relationship with heights. “I can’t stand anywhere near the edge of anything at a height, whether it be a cliff face or even a balcony with railings. Even if it’s logically impossible, I’ll feel like I’m going to fall through the barriers, or be swept off by the wind, or that I can’t quite trust myself not to jump,” she tells me. “I remember on school trips not wanting to climb to the top of buildings, like cathedrals or towers, and having to wait at the bottom with a disgruntled teacher. I’m not sure my classmates quite understood, and I certainly didn’t want to draw attention to something I couldn’t really articulate,” she explains, citing a situation intensely recognisable to me, so reminiscent of my own experiences. “The anxiety manifests too in a terrible phobia of lifts, which makes a lot of things difficult - transporting luggage in hotels, getting to job interviews on the highest floors of tall inner-city buildings.”
“That kind of thing can be quite debilitating, not to mention embarrassing. I’ve had my fair share of funny looks... ‘Height’ itself is something of an obsessional subject I am compulsively drawn back to. I’ve never actively sought outside help, but perhaps writing is a kind of necessary purgatory and/or therapy of its own,” she informs me. “A lot of my poetry is about my experiences of climbing and mountaineering - my father has always been a keen hill-walker, so ever since childhood I have had this simultaneous fear and fascination of high places. Without wanting to sound too pretentious, it’s a large part of my internal and external landscape.”
All of these competing issues and concerns are spun together brilliantly with a poet’s observational skills in the opening lines of her prize-winning work I Too Have Dreamt of High Places. “My parents taught me how to climb, up the north face of our three-storey house/They pulled the harness straps tight/In case you fall/I envied the lampposts their height/The window ledge shaling away in my hands/I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t go down.”
But before the unsympathetic reject our psychological condition of acrophobia as unserious, remember that the fear is real and present even if the danger is not. Herein lies a consistency with most anxieties. Sufferers are aware of the “cognitive dissonance”. We can even compute it in rational conversations. Fear is dangerous to us. Yet only heights offer a very literal danger, even though they are unlikely to kill us, simply because we are fearful of them. So the fear keeps us safe, but at a restrictive cost. And yet it is the fear itself that causes our lives to be uncomfortable, as it is extremely unlikely we will ever fall off one of those feared unpleasant heights. We can compute all this, and hold diametrically opposing views simultaneously. It’s what us acrophobes do. That’s me putting the “tit” in antithetical.
***
Author Denis Cronin in his 1980 book Anxiety, Depression and Phobias and How to Cope With Them acknowledges that: “Fear of heights is extremely common. The majority of people do not go to their doctor for treatment for such matters, but simply avoid those occasions which would tend to evoke the fear - like going up ladders, climbing mountains or visiting monuments.” So far, so reasonable. Then he lurches off Reasonable Road, and takes a sharp turn into Vindictive Avenue, proposing: “Psychoanalytic theory suggests that fear of heights may mask a fear of undertaking responsibility, that such people are unadventurous, timid, with a tendency to avoid taking decisions.” So far, so unreasonable. He then goes completely off road, departing any smooth surface of common sense, and judders over the rocky ground of prejudices masquerading as scientific facts.
If standing on the parapet of a tall building, the anxious person becomes worried in case he or she loses control and falls over. The physical fear, therefore, of being dashed to the ground from a building or into the sea from a cliff top, represents a deeper psychological fear of not being in control of one’s own feelings, emotions and actions.
Oh, yeah? Well, if I was standing on the parapet of a tall building with the author of that vindictive diatribe, I’d be thinking of ways to distract the only witnesses.
This is a corrosively reductive theory that repackages the reasonable evolutionary caution of avoiding high drops as a severe personality disorder.
“The situation is thus seen as a threat,” he concludes. Possibly. Or possibly not, as evolution would surely reward those who are able to scale height with their full physical and mental abilities unaffected. They are the ones more likely to survive and thus procreate their gene distributions. After all, the meerkats who used to post a look-out sentry elevated higher than their colleagues (or until their successful TV advertising careers cancelled the need to forage for food) suggest that a group stands a better chance of survival if its surroundings can be surveyed for danger from an elevated vantage-point. Ground dwellers like me, unless we can persuade our surprise lion attacker to consider going vegetarian very quickly by taking a “meat is murder” leaflet when picketing the watering hole, are in serious risk of gene extinction from our preferred height avoidance proclivities.
Yet anyone devoid of a fear of heights would be equally likely to remove themselves from the gene pool pretty early on - in a very messy way.
And as for that author’s accusation of timidity. Frankly, how dare he accuse me of... oh, OK, it’s no problem. He’s probably right. Sorry to have troubled you...
Harbouring a strong fear of heights is incredibly common. Researching this book I interviewed many people who admitted to height phobias, and everyone - a 100% trial result - both (a) had never sought any treatment, and (b) were under the misapprehension that they suffered from vertigo and that altitude would trigger an automatic attack of dizziness.
The fear of becoming dizzy at a dangerous altitude in turn accentuates the fear, turning the anxiety dial even further to the right.
***
I find the books about vertigo located on the library’s top shelf. A mini-ladder is required to select them. Say what you want about librarians’ famed timidity, but callousness in humour and a heightened (pun definitely intended) sense of irony is clearly within their remit. It’s almost like they’re screaming (silently and mutely, obviously): “We don’t just go ‘shush’, point to a ‘Silence’ sign and operate a date stamp, you know.” Apparently you can study a popular undergraduate degree in librarianship - how can it take three years to learn how to operate a date stamp? OK, it’s jokes like that which make them keep the height anxiety self-help books on the top shelf to punish people like me.
Elsewhere in the psychology section I see a spine proclaiming a book’s title as Understanding Woman’s Mood Swings; maybe that gets filed on a different shelf every day, for no apparent reason, but they won’t tell you where it is because you should know already where it is, because that would involve taking an interest, and it’s your fault anyway for not knowing because you never listen and if you had listened then you might have heard where it was going to be filed today... (I think you get where I’m going with this routine: singledom.)
Eventually I source, then cross-reference, an overbearing weight of peer-reviewed evidence that disproves a common misconception. Vertigo is entirely separate from height anxiety. This means someone with a phobia of heights will not automatically trigger an attack of vertigo when ascending to a lofty position - with the ensuing symptoms of feeling dizzy and fainting. Yes, I am aware that becoming dizzy and fainting is not convenient at the best of times, but a particular definition of an inconvenient place to become dizzy and risk losing consciousness would be on top of something really, really high. So I am not going to get vertigo when I am high-up - on stairs, in a hot air balloon or on a ledge. This is a massive comfort.
Then Dr. Hannah Stratford, a phobia expert at Oxford University, tells me something that aids me enormously, proving that just a couple of short sentences can instigate a lifelong improvement when addressing my encountered difficulties with stairs and heights. She tells me that an irrational fear triggered by a phobia will definitely not cause me to pass out. Quite the opposite, as my brain is likely to manufacture a massive blood rush and provide a fight- or -light-aiding adrenaline shot - my bodily equivalent of sinking a triple espresso with nine sugars.
There is one fascinating exception to the you-won’t-faint-with-a-phobia rule, which shows how unknowingly clever our human bodies really are. She reveals this amazing fact to me later when agreeing to be interviewed for this book.
***
Holidays are a vulnerable time for us acrophobes. Escaping the dreamless drudgery of the workplace for a mere few short days each year, holidays invariably include activities misguidingly described as entertainment or fun that involve climbing high things. Even cultural breaks inevitably include mandatory climbs - church towers, view points, lookout stations, Ferris wheels or other selected implements from a torture box for the height phobic.
Activity holidays expect people to voluntarily separate themselves from their money for the privilege of parachuting, paragliding, abseiling and other horrors. One fellow holidaymaker asked if I wanted to go hang-gliding with him. I think I would have preferred to undergo an actual hanging - at least the ensuing death would be quicker. Whereas while negotiating the stresses and strains, balancing the conflicting hopes and disappointments of life for fifty weeks of the year back home it is relatively easy to side-step going up high things (as long as you allow time to avoid lifts and climb stairs very slowly). On holiday it becomes rudely unavoidable. “But,” your travelling companions will say, “you can’t go to Paris without going up the Eiffel Tower”; although that doesn’t turn out to be technically true, unless the Eurostar now terminates half-way up it... (But this may soon be the case, as train stations now contain so many shops it is only a matter of time before they move the space-greedy trains and platforms out and convert them into more retail capacity.)
The first psychologist I see to research height anxiety, and to address my affliction ahead of taking a balloon flight, commences the session by being openly doubtful, bordering upon cynical, about my condition. Then he soon upgrades cynical to nasty. This is hardly the person-centred, people-focused Rogerian counselling I was expecting. In fact, he is transmitting a strong signal through non-verbal communication that my ailment is unworthy of psychological exploration.
The psychologist cites scientific research papers that conclude empirically that my symptoms may be manifestly linked to possible multiple personality disorders. Thanks. “But only mild ones,” he seeks to reassure me later.
At the end of each dispensed scientific conclusion he quotes a research paper, always twin-authored. He sends me these later, decorating his dual-authored statement sources with parentheses and the published date i.e. (Swann & Gosbert, 1997). He states concerns about the legitimacy of some sufferers claiming a bona fide psychological condition (Mycliffe & Brown, 2001). He then opines that sufferers like me are often deluded, and have strong emotional problems (Harsh & Insensitive, 2013). I respond by imagining whacking him in the face with a frying pan (Tom & Jerry, 1966) or dropping an anvil on him (Itchy & Scratchy 2014).
This does help provide me with some insight and determination - a determination to find another psychologist.
French Flies: Cross-Channel Pioneers
Ah, Paris. The city - or rather la cité - d’amour. Je t’aime, Paris. A sentence which, by the standards of my fellow Englishmen, qualifies me as bilingual. No Parisian ever contemplates leaving home without trousers, door key and an unnecessarily long, pointy baguette. But please, France, stop nicking our words and claiming them as your own: examples of English language word-rustling include le weekend, le pub, le parking; we wouldn’t do that, it’s just so passé, louche and laissez-faire.
Le Terror came to Paris in 1784. And again in 1994, when I attempted to go up the Arc de Triomphe. For me this was not a triumph. In fact Napoleon got a better result at Waterloo. Here’s why.
Actually getting to the Arc de Triomphe alive is almost impossible due to French traffic. In order to drive a French car, you need to be (a) a holder of a valid licence, and (b) an untreatable psychopath. Then dispense with your rear and side mirrors, and your brake. Never give way, never stop, never care about remaining alive.
Reaching the island where the Arc de Triomphe stands hubristically with typical French arrogance amidst a dodecagonal layout involves negotiating eight lanes of traffic, fed by no fewer than twelve separate roads all converging into the roundabout with the monument in the middle. Presumably because of this there is a grave dedicated to the unknown pedestrian... I mean... soldier.
This dash is similar to, and shares an equivalent survival rate with, hatching turtles scrambling across a beach in a usually doomed attempt to return to sea. Fortunately, nowadays there are two underpasses and a Metro station.
Scaling all 164 feet of stone enabled me to stand atop a ginormous slab originally ordered by Napoleon to honour those returning from victorious campaigns by “a homecoming through arches of triumph”. Rather than remembering those who died in the Napoleonic Wars, it prompted most onlookers to speculate that someone who built that ostentatious slab of self-praise for their military general must have a right Napoleon complex. Oh, I see.
Although ordered by the distinctly non-diminutive general (contrary to popular myth, Napoleon was of normal height for the era) in 1806, the project was severely delayed until 1836; typical builders: always late - they probably couldn’t source a skip until then.
I recall somehow reaching the top, fortified by wine that had ironically been fortified itself according to the label, and then getting as near to the edge as I dare - which involved
actually working out the exact geometric point that kept me furthest away at all times from any of the building’s rectangular edges. Terrifyingly, the perimeter wall was only around two feet high. I think that’s worth typing again: the perimeter fence was two feet high. That was all the guarding required for this immensely high structure. That has quite an impact on me, almost as much of the 186 feet drop that I was currently fixating on. This was Health & Safety from 1836.
Returning to Paris more recently, and with utterly no intention whatsoever of returning back to the top of the Arc and reliving the ultimate acrophobic’s nightmare, binoculars enabled me to confirm that far higher additional fencing has now been sensibly added.
***
The very first balloon flight took place near Paris. It was also dangerous, reckless and demonstrated craziness bordering upon the sectionable. It relied upon basic scientific ignorance, and yet it was revered as an incredible success - both a giant leap and a giant first step for mankind.
Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (6 January 1745-2 August 1799) and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (26 August 1740-26 June 1810) were brothers from Annonay near Lyon who ran a paper company. They had already encountered the newly discovered fashionable gas of the age, hydrogen, and knew it could be used to inflate miniature paper balls and send them floating through the air - based upon, it later transpired, hydrogen being fourteen times lighter than air.
But the properties of regular air could be altered dramatically by the introduction of heat. This had been observed at their paper works, where smoke could propel paper into the air through the chimney. Heating air arouses the individual molecules, and causes them to shift their behavioural patterns. One change was noticed by Joseph-Michel Montgolfier who reportedly informed a correspondent: “I observed the principles of hot air at work inflating an old wind bag, by observing my wife.” His true vocation was not as a pioneer of flight, but as Les Dawson’s opening act.
The Man With His Head in the Clouds Page 5