I’m a big old chicken. When it comes to things I’m scared of, there are a few. I’m emetophobic, I’m very open about that with most people. I’m paranoid about fire, which I assume I get from my school burning down twice. I’m fine with thunder, starting to become nervous about lighting (…fire…) and not keen on wind – that one I trace back to a lot of fence panels blowing down when I was a child, turning into an irrational fear that the entire roof will come off. I’m not scared of umbrellas or elastic bands but I’m nervous about either of them injuring my fingers. Umm… snakes. Terrified of snakes. Not keen on wasps but I can deal with them – I’m the designated critter-remover at work. I’m fine with spiders, or at least the non-threatening varieties we get in the UK.
And I’m scared of spiral stairs. I’m not phobic of them. I can go up and down them but I don’t like them and I particularly don’t like people going in the opposite direction.
It’s May. It’s 2015. I’m in Estonia. Specifically I’m in Tallinn. It’s taken a long time to get here – I’ve stayed overnight at Gatwick for a dawn flight, changing at Riga, only for the Riga flight to be delayed. Given that I’ve just spent the best part of ten hours at that airport, I’d have gone into town if I’d known earlier just how long it would be delayed for. It’s another two and a half years before I get into Riga city centre. I resort to taking a taxi from the airport to my apartment and the landlady is waiting to show me how the keys work.
So now it’s a new day. I go out and about in Tallinn. What is there to see? Well, the Old Town is pretty spectacular. Let’s wander around. Very nice. Is that a church, there? Yes, it is. Let’s go inside. I can go up the spire of the church for €3. That’s not much. It probably has a good view. Let’s go.
This tower was built around the 16th century. It doesn’t have a lift. I can manage some stairs. How many stairs? 124m-worth of stairs. 232. Ok. I’ll stop whenever I get out of breath – every twenty stairs at first, every other stair higher up, probably. It hasn’t yet occurred to me that this is getting on for half the height of the Eiffel Tower.
The stairs are ok at first. Partway up is a corridor with folding seats for tired people. I don’t really need them yet. Unbeknownst to me, we haven’t even started yet.
The trouble with these stairs is that they’re spirals. Of course they are. Elderly spirals, wearing away at the edges spirals. Two-way traffic spirals. There’s no railing to hang onto, only a rope. The higher I climb, the more people I meet coming down. One of us has to squish up against the wall while the other delicately uses the inside of the stairs, where they get narrow and there’s nothing to hold onto except that kind of pole thing where the stairs meet in the middle. The more times this happens, the scarier it gets. It goes up and up and up. If someone slips and falls, they’re going to bump down and round the stairs a very long way. There’s no landing, no doorway, no mini-floor, to catch you. Nothing but the bottom. I can no longer remember whether someone did slip and have to catch themselves on the middle of the stairs or whether that’s a fragment of nightmare. And it seems I’ll never come to the end of these steps.
It’s a very long way up. I can see right across the Baltic, almost to Helsinki. Helsinki’s only fifty miles away, almost due north. I saw the lights of Helsinki last night as my plane came into land in Tallinn in the dark. The rooftops of the city are a very long way below me. And the walkway is just that – a set of planks laid around the top of the tower, blocked in by chicken wire. This isn’t a place designed to be stood upon. I do my best to ignore it all because I’m worked hard to earn this view and I’m going to make the most of the view while I’m up here. Not at all because I’m nervous about going back down.
And it is a good view.
But then I have to descend. Now I have all the same problems that I did earlier but instead of actively fighting gravity, I’m trying to work with it on my own terms. I want to go down, just not as fast as it wants me to go. Going down stairs makes my legs tremble at the best of times, just from the exertion on the muscles from bending my knees so much. I know I’m doing that awkward breathing that’s verging on panic. I know I keep muttering “it’s all good, it’s all good”, which only ever means it isn’t.
I’m not quite an actual nervous wreck by the time I hit real solid ground but I’m not far off it. Tallinn is a walled city and I want to explore the walls but they’re all accessed by spiral stairs and I can’t shake this newfound fear whenever I go up them. It’s not the height. I’m ok with heights, more or less. It’s literally just the spiral stairs, which make me quiver for the rest of the week.
It’s now three years later. I don’t encounter spiral stairs often in my day-to-day life but I went up some at Kolossi Castle in Cyprus the other day and it all came flooding back. I was going to say they were easier because they were one-way only, but they weren’t. But we only went up one storey at a time, which made traffic easier and also made risk of falling less risky.
So yes, that’s the story of how one trip, one little adventure, gave me a new fear apparently for life.
As a bonus – and one you’re all crying out for – this post has made me want to dye my hair. I’m naturally blonde and right now, there’s no dye left in it and the blonde has peeked out again. A lot of people have said how lovely it is and how I should never dye it again. But – only the length of it is blonde, the bit that’s actually attached to my head is mouse at best. It’s the sort of colour that makes it look greasy just six hours after washing it, even when it isn’t. I’m really starting to think seriously about hunting up a nice dark shade of orangeish-red like I had in Estonia. When I get back from Iceland. I can’t deal with dye falling out everywhere while also dealing with six days on the trail, no electricity, no baths and trying not to starve to death.