VERTIGO AND AMARETTO CAKE

I felt myself panicking. It was irrational, but these things always are, aren’t they? The road up to the Needles Battery climbed into the sky. To our right, the wide grey sea, and between us and it, what felt like one narrow footpath, and then 200 feet of vertical drop. I gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white, heart pounding. I was having something like a panic attack.

The Intrepids knew we weren’t in any danger. So did I really, but the endocrine system was already spiking into overdrive and the brain was suddenly all adrenaline. Vertigo had taken over and I was struggling.

“It’s the reason I can’t fly kites,” I said, breathing heavily. The road ahead seemed to disappear into the sky, making it look like we would drop off the edge of the world. Everything was grey sky and dots for a while, then we toppled over the brow and the flat sea of the English Channel came back into view. I really hate vertigo.

The Needles Old Battery is a fortification built by Lord Palmerston, a Prime Minister in the 1860s. To ward off any strategic attack on Portsmouth from Napoleonic France, he established the battery at the Westernmost point of the Island. Heavy 9-inch guns were installed and teams of men were stationed there in case of enemy action. Much later, in the Second World War, it was used to search out and destroy any potential invasion from Nazi Germany, as well as a training ground for the use of still-developing anti-aircraft technology.

We had cups of hot chocolate up there, blustered by the cold, wet sea breeze. Two of the big guns are still there, archaic and frozen. I always wonder whether these statue-like weapons always looked so immovable, so solid. It’s tough to imagine the crew of soldiers shouting through the rain and wind, rotating and loading and clanking such an enormous piece of equipment. On a peaceful day in this Century, it’s even harder to imagine the cacophonous explosion, or the shell whistling over the ocean. War is unimaginable for us who’ve lived in peace; cannons are monoliths, stone-cold memorials of a brutal but short time in our history. I smoothed a hand over a monolith. That’s the way it should be.

In contrast, the tiny town of Yarmouth was quaint and delightful. Quiet streets of quirky little shops, pubs with Tudor beams and hanging baskets, an old church with a handsome gold-handed clock; the whole place was very sweet. Somehow the wind and the rain couldn’t burst through the niceness of Yarmouth, so by the time we were wandering, there was a little gentle sunlight on the windows of the Jireh Tea Rooms. My Mum and I went in for cake, but for some reason my Dad didn’t follow.

He likes his own space. At a wedding once, my Dad disappeared between the ceremony and the photographs, missing all the necessary mingling and waiting around before the reception venue was ready. He reappeared about forty minutes later, carrying a pot plant. He got away with it because it looked like it might just have been a wedding present, and not the fruit of him finding extended mingling so unbearable that he had had to go to a garden centre in his best suit.

Anyway, I had amaretto cake and a pot of tea today, which was lovely, and might just be the afternoon sunshine to counter the rainy morning of panic attacks and vertigo. I was alright really - just embarrassed that I got so affected by it.

It’s a shame about the rain too. Tomorrow’s forecast is similar: low pressure crouching over the whole of Southern England. We’re having an okay time though, despite all of that.

I do wonder though, vertigo aside, socially speaking, thinking about my own panic attacks in certain moments that make me want to disappear without a trace... whether I might be more like my Dad than I care to admit.