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?












