For Christmas I Got A Brand New Phobia

I bet you think you're funny, Santa.

I’m sat on a cold metal bench, staring at the floor of Heathrow’s Terminal 2. It’s pale marble crisscrossed with darker veins, like rivers seen from a great height in the dead of winter.

There’s just enough detail in these floor tiles to hold my attention. Anything less, and I’d have to think about something else, like, like…

No. Focus. Un-think. Make it all go away.

…

Yes. That’s it. Good.

It’s been nearly half an hour since my partner M. went through security without me, bound for the plane I was supposed to be on. Amazing, really, how time can fly when you’re staring in a stubbornly empty-headed way at the floor (Fior Di Pesco finish, installed by stone contractor Vetter UK for the terminal’s June 2014 opening by Queen Elizabeth II, hence its nickname, The Queen’s Terminal), trying to calm yourself down to the point you might - might - be able to think your way through all this.

I notice that my right knee has stopped jumping up and down of its own accord. Hey, that’s an improvement! Before that was the uncontrollable shaking, some kind of delayed shock with the added sensation that something had me by the throat - but gradually it all calmed down to that one jittery leg. Now that’s gone too. Progress. Jolly good.

A thought creeps past my defences: oh no, did I get all my underwear? And my socks? I check the variety of bags I dragged out the suitcase before M sent it down the conveyor belt. Yes. Thank god. I may be missing Christmas in the tropics, I may not currently have anywhere to live in the middle of the British winter, but I have my pants, so there’s hope.

This is far too much thinking. Stop.

I dial it back, and stare at the floor again.

Time passes.

In the distance a plane roars into the sky, cutting through my non-thoughts.

I check the time, then Flight Radar. Yep - that’s probably it. That’s her. She’s on her way. I won’t see her until Spring.

I guess that’s that, then.

Now I become aware of how cold I’m getting, and there’s probably an awful lot to do, as soon as I allow myself to think about it.

But I’m oddly reluctant to move. It’s been nice, in a weirdly post-traumatic sort of way, to spend half an hour here, with my plans utterly ripped to shreds so I have nothing except Here to deal with in the short term. It’s been nice to just linger in a public place like this. Didn’t economist Tyler Cowen just say this kind of hanging-out is a bit of a dying art? I should put that in my newsletter.

(Ah, yes - I have a newsletter!)

Okay. I think I’m ready. It’s time.

Let it all back in, Mike.

1. Around 7.30am this morning, on the connecting tube service between Heathrow’s Terminal 4 and Terminal 2, I started having a panic attack.

2. I don’t have a history of panic attacks. Even at the worst points in my life, I’ve remained unflappable to a fault. Even-tempered, stoic, resolutely clueless - that’s always been my way in a crisis. You’ll certainly find me losing my cool about made-up things (“seriously, that’s your ending, Lost?”) but in real-world situations…well, it’s often like I don’t quite have the imagination for dealing with the real world. Only for stories. Consequently, I’m usually sat there sipping a cup of tea when everything is burning down around me. It’s probably not my best trait.

3. Hey, I should probably buy a cup of tea. What a good idea!

4. *Later, mid-sip* Where was I? Right, yes. Panic attacks.

5. I’ve always been a bit nervous of flying - and I’ve never quite understood it, because I otherwise love everything about planes and the technological miracle of human flight. I got a little of this from my late dad - a aircraft technician, as I wrote about here - and a lot more of it from articles in National Geographic about Concorde and jet fighters and the way they navigate through the many layers of the sky over our heads. So much of aviation is still a mystery to me. Aerodynamic lift: how does it work? Disagreements abound. I love it all. How interesting. So much to learn!

6. At some point over the last year or so, this nervousness has quietly transformed itself into a full-blown phobia. The kind that triggers panic attacks, of the sort that can stop me getting on planes.

7. This isn’t anything special. In fact, it’s thoroughly banal - anything from one-in-ten to 40% of everyone have some form of aviophobia, and about 5% of them (of us, I should now start saying) cannot force themselves to get on a plane, even with the right medication.

8. I already know the facts here. Flying is absurdly, stupifyingly safe, and statistically speaking I should be much more afraid of eating lunch or having a bath. My terror of flying feels like a statement of truly outrageous egomania: OH RLY! You believe that you alone, out of about 11 million people, are destined to eat dirt from 35,000 feet? Get over yourself, you big plum duff.

9. Weighing up these facts doesn’t work on me. This isn’t about simply reasoning myself out of it. Facts are useless and this fear, whatever the root of it, is irrational. (Hooray! Bloody pathetic amateur science enthusiast *I* am, it appears.)

10. Taking a safe but large dose of valium (diazepam) that M. gave me at 6am didn’t work either - unless a symptom of that is finding it curiously enjoyable to sit in Terminal 2 of Heathrow Airport in December for the best part of an hour. But no, actually that’s the kind of bizarre thing I would enjoy anyway. Can’t blame drugs for that.

11. No, no, no. Stop. My brain can only handle ten imaginary bullet-points in its current state. It’s time to stop thinking and actually do something. Beginning with, you know, discovering if the apartment in Scotland - which M. and I just spent the last week emptying before moving out of it yesterday morning - is still available, or if it’s been taken, in which case, I quite literally have no idea where I’m living for the next few months?

12. Twelve, now? Come on, man. Move yourself.

When my parents were courting, long before I was a twinkle in either of their eyes, my mum apparently used to ride around Yorkshire in a moped.

It must have been a sturdy model, because my dad - all 6-foot-everything of him - hitched a ride on the back of it. Because of his great height, this must have involved him folding up his lanky body like a collapsed ironing board, so his knees were placed somewhere near his ears, clutching the sides of the moped (or a sissy bar, if it had one) to keep himself onboard.

This can’t have been the most comfortable thing in the world - which is why, my mum once told me, there was a time when they stopped at some red traffic lights, and my dad decided to relieve the cramp in his knees. He planted his boots onto the road on either side and stood up, lifting himself completely upright.

Unfortunately this was the exact moment when the lights turned green - and my mum, not realising what had happened, hit the gas and accelerated away at what must have felt to her an unusually invigorating speed, leaving my dad stood in the middle of the road, just stood there, too stunned to react, until she was out of sight.

My mum had many stories of my dad doing things like this - and I heard them all by doing something similar myself, at which point she’d say, “oh, you’re just like your dad - ahhh, there was that time when he leapt out the wrong side of a train carriage and thundered uncontrollably down an embankment with all his suitcases until he hit a barbed-wire fence. You’re just the same. Walking disasters, both of you.”

She wasn’t wrong. I’ve had my fair share. (Shipwrecked on an island of murder-swans, for example.)

Usually I quite like this bit of the adventure. Everything’s gone wrong, you’ve got over the jarring shock of it, the mortifying embarrassment hasn’t kicked in (eg. “oh no, you bloody haven’t, not this AGAIN…”) and it temporarily feels like a creative problem you’ll actually enjoy solving, the fun part, before the relative awfulness of putting that new plan into motion has to begin.

Not this time, though. I’m too tired, too disheartened, and more than a little pissed off with myself.

I mask it well when I meet a friend for coffee in the middle of London.

I grin and bear it when I get to Victoria Coach Station and spend the next 9 hours hanging round until my overnight bus back to Glasgow arrives - because, amazingly, my flat was still available (my landlord said he was already talking to someone, so if I’d delayed my phone-call to him for a few more hours, it would have gone).

I try to enjoy the book I’m reading, and almost manage it - but it’s the one I meant to read on the plane, so, no.

But then I remember something - and somehow, it’s enough to turn this tragedy into exactly the kind of farce I feel like was born for:

Let's Look Up Together

That’s the topic of the next season of this newsletter, starting in the new year, after I’ve sent you something new about the joys of witching week.

As I said in that introduction to the upcoming season:

“There’s so much to learn about the invisible sea we live at the bottom of, which we breathe in and out of our bodies 20,000 times a day. The sky isn’t just a passive backdrop to our lives down here on solid ground - and it’s not just something to be terrified about when it roars out of control as it’s increasingly doing these days, as evidenced by the last 24 hours in Florida. It’s also within us, and part of us, and we resonate to its changes in ways that medical science is just starting to understand (like how, as I said here, a healed bone can ache with a change in local air pressure).

What about those of us who live further up in the atmosphere, including the roughly 81 million of us living above the 2,500m mark? From a scientific perspective, how do people adapt to life at high altitude when it can be such a struggle for the rest of us? What can that tell us about how the humans of the future might adapt to life on other planets?

My questions are endless:

• How come snow isn’t white, that wind is silent and that you can’t actually smell rain (which doesn’t contradict what I wrote here)?

• Why are snowflakes so predictable in their shapes that some people have written catalogues of them? What’s the science - or more correctly, the mathematics - behind those shapes?

• Why is snow regarded as so much fun, and yet rain as so much hell-nope? (Disclaimer: I love both.)

There’s certainly a season’s worth of rabbit-holes to scurry down here, so that’s what I’m doing for the next season of this newsletter.”

Ha. Hahaha. Ahhhhh, Mike. Hey, you know another question you can add to that edifying list you have there? It’s this one: how can you get over a fear of flying?

I’m writing about the air, and I’ve just discovered I’m terrified of being up in it. Honestly, you can’t make this up - and I promise I haven’t, because I’d never attempt to fabricate a plot-twist this unrealistic-looking.

It’s just what it is, and it’s where I find myself, about to write my way into a field of inquiry that’s suddenly far more personal than I planned for myself. I’ll be on display. Dance for us, idiot science-writer. Dance harder.

So it’s there, on a bus swaying through the frozen-looking streets of London at 1am, that I start to cheer up.

I know it’s going to take me a while to get all this squared away in my head, and a bit longer than that to know how to write and publish it as a newsletter (it’ll take until Christmas Eve, it turns out, which is another absurdity to add to the pile here).

But somehow, this makes it doable again. It’s appropriately ridiculous for me to discover this after setting myself the challenge of writing about it, and therefore, I guess, it’s entirely on brand. I’m emotionally invested to an uncomfortable level, but maybe I need to be.

Fact is: I will not be letting this phobia get in the way of my plans (and I will be spending next Christmas in Costa Rica with M.) - and for now, this, right here, feels like a place I can start from, however bumpy the ride might get.

Up we go, then.

***

If you’re celebrating it, a very merry Christmas to you - and see you again in a few days.

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Images: Simone Hutsch; John Cameron; Winston Tija; Iliya Vjestica.