I ask who’s applying to Oxford. Half the hands go up. Cambridge? About the same number. A hand stays raised. “Yes?” “Why didn’t you go to university?” Hmm... that’s a nice scarf. “There will be an opportunity for questions afterwards,” interjects the kindly teacher, like the bell signifying the end of a round in a boxing match just as an opponent has completed his backswing before landing a knock-out punch.
“Richard can begin his talk now,” which clearly means “Get on with it. If you’ve got nothing prepared we’re about to find out.” “So, please welcome properly,” pausing whilst he clearly looks down at his notes for my name, “...Richard O. Smith. He’s an author and you may have heard some of his jokes on TV and radio. He’ll talk to you about the Ottoman Empire and subsequent ramifications into post-Byzantine monarchical statehood.” There’s a few seconds of cold silence and then “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Everyone laughs. Clearly they’ve stung many visitors before with that one. It’s their familiar comforting little joke. And it works better as an ice breaker than most commissioned ships in Greenland’s navy.
I begin speaking and make the mistake of looking at the blonde girl, whose face has now moved from a frown to an active scowl. Later she upgrades her facial expression further, from scowl to venomous.
There is a part of my routine where I have to swear. Having encountered school kids regularly on the bus, I am fairly sure they are familiar with swear words. My joke relies on a taboo word, and unwisely I have already started the routine. It’s too late to stop now, and I can’t think under the glare of the public speaking spotlight of a possible detour. Committed, I deliver an “f” bomb to the room. The teacher sitting at the table on the stage with me shudders like he’s just received an electric shock from his chair, forcing him to suddenly hinge upright. Some of the girls laugh, but I hear competing exhalations of breath. It is the only occasion when the blonde girl laughs. Mainly because she thinks I’ve got myself into trouble.
After that, I make a note not to swear anymore. Mentally censoring my act invokes a two-second delay from brain to mouth - like a radio phone-in programme. Inevitably this ensures my timing suffers, but the audience are wonderfully generous and polite. Apart from Blondie, obviously, who sits with arms crossed staring directly above at a turned-off light. One day she’s going to make her future husband very unhappy.
Performing comedy to Radio 4-savvy middle-aged people in arts centres and village halls is, it turns out, different to gigging to a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. So I attempt to change direction slightly, and do a Lady Gaga joke I once wrote for The Now Show that got edited out of the broadcast. It kills (knew it shouldn’t have been edited out!) and I feel a buoyancy returning to my confidence. Everyone laughs, apart from Blondie plus the teacher whose face expresses slight anxiety - and I realise for the first time that there is an obscure, unintentional double meaning to the punch line, which although undeliberate could be interpreted as a very rude joke about gay sex. But surely that reference is so opaque, so encoded and so unlikely to be detected, especially in such hallowed, refined surroundings as these, that it’s not worth a second thought.
As soon as I finish my talk, the teacher leads the girls in a round of appreciative applause, and he then announces: “This is Clarissa. She’ll look after you now.” Clarissa is eighteen, but dresses, acts and speaks like she’s fifty-eight. She uses sixth form uniform liberties to be creative with scarves. Lots of tiny little scarves. My wife would know the proper fashion name for them, but I have no idea what this clothing accessory is called. Clarissa’s delegated job is to lead me back to reception. En route her phone rings. “Sooo sorry,” she announces, “but I have to... Ya? Ya. Ya. Ya. Don’t care, you tell him there are other vets in Gloucestershire! Ya. Ya. Tuscany is not a problem, but Perpignan could be. Ciao.” She presses a digit on her phone then emits a theatrical sigh. “Sorry. Mummy’s taking a bit too much on at the moment. There are problems with her polo ponies when we’re supposed to be leaving for Tuscany, but she also wants to fit in a couple of days at daddy’s bolt-hole in France beforehand. So, is there anything I can get you?” “Yes,” I think, “access to your life.”
Then even by the standards of a teenager, she manages to really shock me with what she says next: “Are you OK going down the stairs if you stay on the side away from the banister?” “Yes... hang on, how did you know?” “Oh, I have a big problem with heights too,” she says in a reassuring it’s-no-biggie tone. Clearly £30k a year school fees are worth it if it imparts this much deductive observational skill. No one has ever noticed I’m bathmophobic before. Or have they? Perhaps my self-deception was more extensive than even I realised, and everyone thought “oh here’s that guy who is terrified of stairs but we mustn’t let on we know in case it hurts his feelings, and so he can go on pretending that no one notices.”
Clarissa leads me into the school’s small single-room museum, where I have time for one question before she has to leave. Maybe she has to go and buy another tiny scarf. So I want to use my one question opportunity well and ask a good one: “What’s it really like being a boarder? How much do you miss home?” Drawing breath to respond, she pauses - then freezes like a suddenly distracted squirrel. Hesitating to assemble the correct words, to express herself with the profound poignancy I’d expect of someone aspiring to read English at Oxford, after further deliberation still she finally replies: “It’s alright, I suppose.” Before eventually elaborating that she misses her friends during the holidays. Two of those aforementioned friends then join us, and she informs them, “You should have come. He was really funny.” That’s nice of her.
Mercifully there are no more vertiginous steps to negotiate - just a long corridor lit from the right-hand side by yellowy autumnal sunlight, and an easy shallow flight leading back up to reception. Immaculately mannered Clarissa says goodbye and thanks me for visiting the school. “That talk was really brilliant. Really funny,” she confirms. “Thank you,” I say with genuine gratitude. “Ya, all the girls agreed you were great. We especially liked your gay sex joke.”
***
Although a reductively nutshell definition, counselling is predominately about helping a client manage their anxieties.
A famous nineteenth-century psychoanalyst born in Vienna of Jewish extraction took this view. This shrink also coined the phrase “paranoid schizoid position”, which theorises that a baby is born with anxieties. Can you guest the therapist’s name? That’s right, it was Melanie Klein. (You said Sigmund Freud, didn’t you? Don’t pretend you didn’t! I know I did.) We all have inherent anxieties from birth, yet some of us have our anxiety levels set too high. And turning down the thermostat on those anxieties is frustratingly difficult.
I am often staggered by the ability of my brain to coldly fib to the rest of my body, telling it to prepare for dangers that plainly do not exist.
Anxiety covers potential experiences with an impervious membrane of fear, suffocating ambition. It its extreme form it disqualifies meaningful engagement with the world, invalidates potential experiences by the mind rushing to signal imagined dangers. It sees imaginary pitfalls where none exist and recognises monsters where none roams.
Scenarios which the majority would consider either neutral or pleasurable - unthinking participation activities, driving a car, getting on a train to meet a friend - are hugely problematic activities, mined with dangers. For decades I could not go upstairs on a bus, yet sometimes anxiety meant it was hard enough for me to even contemplate boarding a bus at all. Other people go on holiday. This is normal. These are collectively sought-after activities, their normality endorsed by the majority.
But not by me. Anxiety has undermined my ability to have these experiences in my life. Yes, it does make me inexpressibly angry as a consequence. Society punishes people by taking away their passports or banning them from driving. I have broken no laws, but receive the same punishments, alongside a life sen
tence of extreme anxieties.
Unsticking myself from these fears requires immense effort. And acrophobia forms only part of this. Living with general anxiety is akin to encountering a permanently malfunctioning warning light, a distracting red flash constantly flickering when there is really nothing malfunctioning to be warned about, except the warning light itself. The fact that the alarm is always false somehow misses the point, or perhaps is itself the true point.
Should a malfunctioning burglar or car alarm regularly be activated, then announcing “it’s OK everybody, it’s only a false alarm so there’s no genuine threat or danger,” isn’t really going to placate the neighbours. The damage has already been done by the invasive alarm constantly mis-triggered. The fear is real, even if the danger isn’t. The alarm is horribly disruptive, irrespective of whether or not there are any actual burglars. At its worst, anxiety deflavours life, sucks all the nice chocolate from it and just leaves the hard unrelished bits underneath. You get the stone but no cherry.
Anxiety disallows freedom. Sometimes it feels like living in a cage where the cage door has been flung open decades ago, and yet I remain dutifully sitting on the perch. It’s the freedom that taunts you, the realisation that you cannot participate in the world, engage with it, go up to it and ask it to dance, and be capable of dealing with the consequences. The transition from child to adulthood unquestionably meant much less to me than others, because I was still trapped with character attributes (fear of dark, stairs, going out, heights, socialising). Hence few of the prizes normally obtained by reaching adulthood were available for me.
Do I sound bitter? I hope so, because I am. I would shiver uncontrollably. Painful psychosomatic headaches would flare up suddenly. My legs would flail like Bambi on a frozen lake. Just being in small room or at the theatre I would feel uncontrollable nausea, palpitations and a frightening sense of imminent vomiting, later diagnosed as emetophobia.
There are numerous occasions - several within the last few weeks - when I have gone to a pub to meet friends, seen them through the window, but have felt crippling anxiety that forbids me from entering the pub, even though I really, really want to see these people I know very, very much. Especially as an occupational hazard of writers is often enforced alienation in the day job.
I’m terrified to be standing in the street, or getting the bus home. But I have to get home as quickly as possible. Naturally, when I get home, and the anxiety starts to subside, it is immediately replaced with feelings of acute and reoccurring regret. Needless to say, this is not something I tend to share with people. So when I tell counsellors about it, then it shows a deserved confidence in them. But I have not previously admitted this to anyone, strangers, friends nor, more dishearteningly, mental health professionals. There are three prominent reasons for this: shame, embarrassment and the likelihood of not being believed.
Quite understandably, people cannot dissociate the ability to speak to a capacious room packed with paying people for an hour doing successful stand-up from an inability to go into a pub or board a bus. And most of the time I cannot comprehend it either.
Not forgetting the unacknowledged reality of visiting a GP with my anxieties: “I’m here because I can’t go on holiday,” while people are waiting outside to see the same doctor who might have cancer.
Occasionally it is possible to encounter people who gain importance and purpose from their phobias. I am sure they exist. But the overwhelming majority of people, particularly those with malfunctioning anxiety receptors, do not. I just want to be better. I want to start tasting the flavours life has to offer. Enjoy its colours. Meet life and go to the pub with it - not perennially hide from it most of the time.
Education, as well as counselling, are my twin weapons in the fight back against restrictive phobias. So, what is a phobia? How prevalent are they? And how can we control them rather than let them control us?
***
Living with a fear of heights appears to be one of the most commonly experienced anxieties in Britain. This conclusion was not initially drawn from empirical peer-reviewed scientific evidence, merely anecdotal conversations with friends, colleagues, contacts and the occasional friendly-looking stranger bothered on public transport after I had been drinking. However, after years passed without any noticeable decrease in my altitude anxiety, I started to adopt a more scientific interest in the subject. Consulting published research, it transpires that acrophobia is certainly up there among the nation’s chief fears, but not the chart-topper. Not even close.
The most common fear in Britain, and there are numerous surveys and research polls to qualify this statement, is... (pause to build dramatic effect)... (just a little bit longer)... glossophobia. Hmm. I sense you have a question. And are feeling a bit like those underwhelmed characters in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy after waiting thousands of years to receive the answer “42”.
Glossophobia is the technical name for... Well, see if you can guess which one it is from the Top 10 list below. And no, it’s not the fear of being kept waiting for an answer.
A traditional Top 10 chart rundown of Britain’s most common phobias includes an irrational fear of spiders, snakes, heights, open spaces, dentists, needles, death, germs, enclosed environments, flying and public speaking. Glossophobia is a clinician’s name for the last category in that list.
Year after year in the UK, glossophobia claims the top spot as Britain’s no. 1 phobia, repeatedly knocking “fear of death” down into second position. As has probably been observed before, this means that at a funeral the average Briton would rather be in the casket than deliver the eulogy.
Other phobias are considerably more off-piste, such as top materials scientist and all round good bloke Prof. Mark Miodownik whom I had the good fortune to work with when writing and recording the BBC2 series Dara O’Briain’s Science Club. He has a fear of cheese. Dara callously demonstrated this off-camera for additional studio-audience laughs, watching Prof. Mark retreat in abject consternation from a haphazardly waved cheese square like a panicking man in a monster movie fleeing into the streets.
Not all fears are irrational. I have a terrifying fear of Piers Morgan - but that’s both normal and rational. This does prompt us to question society’s attitudes. Why is claustrophobia sympathetically tolerated, whilst other phobias are insensitively categorised as an indulgence and riper than a gorgonzola left out of the fridge for three weeks for comic humiliation?
These more obscure phobias don’t allow sufferers to possess the sense of bonding inclusivity available to those phobics who suffer any in the legitimising Top 10. We’re the popular phobics - the ones experiencing a condition legitimised by common participation. Yet whatever your phobia - snakes or a fear of playing snakes and ladders (although the latter would technically be ophidiophobia coupled with acrophobia) - the underlying and defining aspects remain the same. Starting with a realisation that the fear is most damaging in itself: i.e. it is the fear that we often fear the most with any phobia.
Phobias are psychological impediments. A phobia is an irrational, abnormal, excessive, persistent, unrelenting, unreasonable fear.
To demonstrate the extent of phobias, and just how far they can blight aspects of life, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary and psychology textbooks which define numerous phobias affecting the daily functioning of numerous otherwise healthy adults. Humans have delivered aversions to many things, and continue to evolve to fit newly invented fears; a recent update of the OED includes words defining computer hardware aversion: terminology for terminal fear of terminals.
There are so many anxieties, each recognised by its own defining word in the OED, that it risks inducing gateophobia in most of us. Gateophobia, by the way, is the fear of insanity - not, as you would reasonably expect, gates. Although a man freaked out and demonstrating uncontrollable splenetic rage by gates would be fairly described as “insane” (or a former To
ry party chief whip) - unless it was a responsive aversion to the “music” of Gareth Gates, which would be reassuringly normal, and a confirmer of functioning sanity.
For most phobias we can thank the Greeks for the words we use to describe them. Agyrophobia is an aversion to crossing the road, whilst alektorophobia is the fear of chickens. Therefore presumably agyroalektophobia is the fear of telling a “why did the chicken cross the road?” joke. Sadly it’s not.
Aichmophobia is defined as an irrational fear of a pointed needle, although, personally, I’d be more fearful of a non-pointed needle. That would definitely hurt a lot more. Meanwhile, wiccaphobia is the fear of witchcraft, not the fear of dubious encyclopaedic facts. No, I didn’t just get that wiccaphobia fact from a well-known on-line knowledge resource.
Spinophobia is an irrational fear of being without a backbone or becoming spineless. I’m a busy man, so please take a moment to add your own Nick Clegg joke here.
Coimetrophobia is a fear of cemeteries. Extreme sufferers wouldn’t be seen dead in one. (See what I did there? Oh, please yourself.)
Alliumphobia is an abject fear of garlic, which is of course indistinguishable from the word francophobia meaning an uncontrollable terror of French people. Surprisingly, bathophobia is not another francophobic word describing French people i.e. it is not the defined condition of being fearful of baths. That is abluthophobia - and a relatively common condition among very young children and the 65 million who currently inhabit France, obviously. (You may have noticed how so much comedy - even billed satire - is extracted from mere reinforcement of stereotypes.)
In fact bathophobia is a fear of depths. My friend once bought a posh looking watch from a charity shop for only £4.95 and, gleaming with pride, showed me the uniquely designed and “surely worth a lot of money” watch. I pointed out that it looked uniquely designed because it was a diver’s watch i.e. it told not the time, but the depth. Hence if someone asked him “what time is it?” he could reply, “I don’t know, but we’re both currently one metre above sea level if that helps.”
The Man With His Head in the Clouds Page 13
