Flying scares mum. What scares you?

As well as boating and sharks, one of mum’s big fears is flying (is there anything she’s NOT frightened of, I wonder?). It’s not a phobia. Just a fear. It doesn’t rule her life or anything. Do you have a fear of something?

Despite her fear, mum’s finally agreed to go to the UK in Uncle Hugh’s new flying van, and they go this Sunday for three days with his friend ‘le Fred’, so I’ll be staying with James & Jane at the kennels, which’ll be fab.

Uncle Hugh’s flying van is a bit bigger than his flying car, but it’s still not got a loo or those nice ladies who sell stuff and make drinks. It’s still REALLY small at the side of those big flying buses that mum normally goes on. She’s only going with him to save money ‘cause she’s got some things to do in the UK and Uncle Hugh was going anyway, so she’s kind of hitching a lift.

Mum’s worried about it not having a loo. Mum says she’s not sure she can go for nearly four hours without peeing. Uncle Hugh says she’ll simply not have to drink, or as le Fred says “pah der bwa pah der peepee”, which I think means “no drink, no pee”. I’m sure mum can hold on for four hours – it’s not long is it? I sometimes think it’s all in her head. Uncle Hugh said she could always use a She Wee and an empty bottle. I’ve no idea what a She Wee is, but it prompted mum to tell Uncle Hugh to “Bollocks!”

She doesn’t let other folk know she’s afraid, she’ll say, “I’m not particularly frightened of flying. I just don’t like it that much. It’s boring and something I’d rather not have to do but I wouldn’t allow my dislike of it to curtail my enjoyment of life, or stop me from travelling. It doesn’t terrify me.”

Rubbish! Sometimes it does terrify her, but she doesn’t like to admit it because she says that whenever she thinks of someone who’s scared of flying she has an image of a little old lady or little old man who’s never been anywhere further than the local village shop and who still points at aeroplanes when they see them up in the sky and say stuff like “It’s not natural. If we were meant to fly, we’d have been born with wings”. Mum doesn’t want folk to think she’s unsophisticated or simple, even though she is – simple anyway. Trust me, mum’s not a complex character. Not at all.

One of mum’s problems is the little bit of knowledge that she has about flying – she blames that on Uncle Hugh telling her stuff. Then there’s her verdant imagination – that’s actually the biggest problem. Whenever she’s up there in the sky in those big lumps of metal, filled to the brim with people, baggage and very combustible fuel she always has visions of the wings being ripped off by huge turbulence and the craft plummeting to the ground in a ball of flame – people screaming and flying around the cabin like flotsam as they fall thousands of feet to their deaths.

Also, she’s a frequent flier and she reckons that the more she flies the more chance she has of experiencing a bad flight. Most of her friends have their own horror story of the flight from hell - from seriously bad turbulence to the undercarriage not coming down. She even knows someone who remotely knows someone who was on that BA flying bus from Beijing that time, the one that crash-landed at Heathrow. Everyone but her, it seems, has a bad tale to tell so she’s simply waiting for hers to happen.

Mum actually prefers long-haul flying to short trips because she says that the most dangerous bits are the taking off and the landing – so with short trips she’s in a virtually constant state of worry and stress. At least with long haul she can relax in between and get topped up with champers until she’s virtually comatose and couldn’t give a damn by the time it does comes to land.

I’m dead relaxed about flying and so is Uncle Hugh. He says the science of flight simply follows the law of physics and that it’s the most natural thing in the world, he says it’s not unnatural at all. He says aeroplanes are simply doing what they are built to do, just like cars. Mum says that if her car breaks down she can simply pull up by the side of the road and ring the AA. I guess she’s got a point.

What’s your fear? I don’t really have one.

Here’s a very short clip of a little dog that went flying with his owners in their little flying car. Trouble is, they forgot to strap him in, and then decided to do some aerobatics. Said dog wasn’t harmed in any way, honest. Just a bit dizzy. A very similar thing happened to me once in Uncle Hugh's flying car when he topped out too abruptly after climbing, and we experienced what he called zerogee for a few seconds. I floated and so did all the dust and maps in the cockpit. It was quite cool. Uncle Hugh now straps me in.