Up, Up And Away

Today I read with some interest, that The Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan has now become the city's tallest building. The structure has risen out of the ashes of The World Trade Centre disaster and once completed will stand 110 stories and over 1,300 feet high.
It looks impressive,iconic and defiant
as it is meant to.
Now I love skyscrapers.
I always have.
However I am truly terrified of heights, and cannot even climb a ten foot ladder  to paint the outside of our bedroom windows !
I inherited my fear from my mother, who when faced with a steep slope or hillside view would enter what could only be described as a frozen catatonic state, which was characterised by a great deal of crying and moaning coupled with a somewhat theatrical sit down wherever she felt safest.
This fear, which as children we loved to take the mickey out of, has only ever affected me once when I was "up" a skyscraper. 
It wasn't up The Empire State, or at the "Top of the Rock" (The Rockerfeller Centre for those that don't know) or up the US Steel building in Pittsburgh..no I had a full blown anxiety attack whilst on the Observation Deck up the Space Needle in Seattle

It was a grey, windy and wet day when I walked out onto the Space Needle's saucer itself. Within seconds, and out of nowhere I was literally overcome with the awful sense that I was falling and without holding onto the low guard rail, I think I would have collapsed onto the floor.
For an absolute age, I  could not move a muscle, not one, and it was only because of the kind intervention of a middle aged Japanese lady who must have taken pity on me, a strange young man shaking quietly in the rain , that I was saved. She came over, asked me something in Japanese then grim faced took my hand firmly and led me back inside where she sat me on a chair and fussed around me like a mother hen
If she had not intervened, I think I would have been still there
awful....awful 


Funny what you are afraid of.....
and what's my favourite film,?
The Towering Inferno
Go Figure?