I’m off travelling for work this afternoon, and won’t get back until after the usual cocktail hour on Friday. I’m afraid that I’ll be thirsty. So I’m going to put my order in for vodka and tonic right now.
But other things scare me too. Like heights, although I’ve mostly conquered that one now. And the size of my credit card bill, which is something I’d like to conquer very soon. And not having anywhere to live, which is becoming a very real fear at the moment, with both my home and my fiancée’s home sold, and no new home in sight yet.
But getting engaged has set a new fear in my mind – that something will happen to Hels. I worry about her. I know she worries about me. I try desperately hard not to smother her as a result of this worry, and it certainly doesn’t keep me awake at night, but there are things about her work, her health, her stress levels – all of which do give me cause for concern, thoughts that meander around the back of my mind and occasionally push to the fore. Not the sort of fear that leaves me in a cold sweat, you understand – just an all-pervading concern that forms a background to life.
Of course, H is a strong and independent individual, quite capable of looking after herself – she’s managed to do that for all the years before we met, so I’m sure she doesn’t really merit that much worry now. But that doesn’t really stop you worrying about your loved ones, does it?
Goodness knows what I’ll be like if/when we have a child. They say that that is when you truly learn what worry and anxiousness are.
Hence the request for a V&T in absentia. I’m sure that will calm my nerves.

I dare not put what I am most afraid of into words. In order for it not to overwhelm me it must remain nebulous and unacknowledged, forever at arm’s length from my conscience. In as much as I am willing or able to articulate it, my terror is manifested in the fear that if I ever really fully comprehended the futility of life, or the all consuming eternity of nothingness that both preceeds and follows it, then I would descend into utter madness.

Put more rationally, I am afraid of going mad. Not that my family has any history of insanity that ought to worry me so, but I have watched Alzheimers consume the mind of one of my most dearly loved kin, and now and then, especially in the night, I am stricken with an unspeakable terror at the fact that my mind might be undone, despite my best possible efforts to maintain it.

Getting old in itself does not bother me. The thought of becoming a respected elder who need no longer concern himself with accumulating experience upon experience is something to be relished. One suspects, however, that this desire might not be unrelated to my fears. What if, I am forced to ask myself, my psyche succumbs to a sickness that forbids me to take pleasure in my wisdom? Ah, terror upon terror. Who would wish to live so long as to experience the mind’s retreat into an abominable all-annulling infancy?

Then there’s going blind. I can imagine living without any of my senses except sight, and although not generally squeamish, tales of unpleasantry involving the eye are almost certainly not for me. Trust me, I’d never encourage anyone to look at this picture from Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic, Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, there is fear of the abyss that is an empty comments box, on the edge of which one teeters, terrified at the thought of falling, falling, falling into silent unheckled space.

This millennium, there have been two occasions in which I have come very close to being deaded (there were some last millennium as well, but you tend not to appreciate these things as a teenager).
The first was a car accident- I was taking a corner and a bus swung out wide and didn’t just drive into my van, but drove into the cab of my van and into me. I was covered with shattered glass, every part of my skin that was not clothed was bleeding, I staggered out of the remains of Big Red (my beautiful, dearly departed van), my head ringing, possibly moments from collapse due to spinal injury, and all I could think was…..thank God I have all my teeth! I actually stuck my bloody, glassy fingers into my mouth to feel that they were all still there. Sure, I’d just had a catastrophic accident, but I was just absolutely delighted that my teeth had remained where they belonged.
The second was while swimming, I got caught in some very heavy waves in some very rocky waters- one of them picked me up and I was rushed under the water at wave-speed through a morass of sharp rocks- if I’d smashed my head on one of them, it would have been adios muchachos. As it is, I only smashed one of my legs, tearing it open to the bone and leaving me stranded and bleeding on a big rock in the middle of gigantic waves for half an hour. And as I scrambled up on to the rock, in intense pain and shaking from the fear of what might have just happened…..again, my fingers went straight to my mouth to make sure I hadn’t lost any teeth. Immense rush of relief on learning they were all still there.
Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not house-proud (Den-proud?). My teeth aren’t exactly fabulous- they’re below average, at best (they’re almost British). It’s not like I’m teeth-obsessed in other areas, like cleaning, or anything. But when it comes to almost-dying, I think that teeth-loss is a good indicator of how bad things are, y’know? Like, sure, maybe you lose a leg, but if you’ve still got your teeth, you’re probably going to be okay.
Er…..right?
Anyway, that’s Fear #1, and the most visceral of my fears. More esoteric fears to follow.
d

Stupid, maybe, but true.
I suspect there’s some sort of control room in the deep recesses of the lump of grey goo I occasionally use for thinking which could present reasons to justify why it happens, but sometimes I scare myself.
Perhaps in that control room a very small man with a moustache is supervising the operation of my body. A sub-lackey (maybe concerned with the observation and maintenance of minor tissues) might point out that, not being a daredevil, regular bungee jumper, hang-glider or Asda shopping trolley destruction derby enthusiast, my average day to day contains very little to get me going. It is more than likely that my adrenal glands look a little rusty around the edges.
At this point the tiny man with a moustache will order the dark and impish controlmen of my subconscious to wheel out the heebie-jeebies. That way the adrenalin production centres of the body can get an airing, so to speak, without all that messing around with hang-gliders, shopping trolleys, elastic ropes and so on, where there is the real possibility of the glands getting an airing through physically leaving the body.
It can be a thought out of nowhere, but the real speciality, in this (mostly) rational atheistic boy, is to wait until I’m here, at home on the Isle of Wight, in this section of a big old converted Victorian school and awake, thirsty, at 3am, in the dark. At the moment I leave my room for the bathroom, running my hand along the still darkened corridor wall to avoid the painfully bright lights, the man with a moustache hands a message to my mostly still sleeping front brain, consisting of the words ‘ooooh, this would be just the time to see a ghost’.
At which point I wake up, faster and with more of a paranoiac edge than any Monday morning could ever hope to achieve. I get the water quickly and use all the lights I possibly can on the way back to bed. I know that I’m being completely irrational and stupid, and that there’s no reason to suggest that our house is haunted…er…beyond that mysterious trouble with the plumbing a few years back. I know that all rational scientific thought points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities…but maybe the ghosts don’t know that.
Silly. I said silly. I told you silly.
But I’ve lived in this old house since I was five, and at 3am my five year old fears are closer to the fore than my twenty-four year old rationalising.