How vodka cured my fear of flying

Monday, 14th December 2009

After 16 years of refusing to set foot on a plane, Lloyd Evans decided to face his demons and fly to the Med with his family. All did not go entirely to plan

I’ve discovered a brilliant way to cure my phobias. It’s so easy, so ingenious and so cheap (it cost me nothing), that I want to share it with as many people as possible. My technique will work its magic on any trivial or unreasonable fear you suffer from. Mine happens to be flying. Or it used to be. Until 28 July this year I hadn’t travelled in a plane, or even visited an airport, for 16 years. I was perfectly content as a flightless species, but my wife likes to flit off to the Med whenever possible and enjoy a week of sunstroke and food poisoning, so she booked us a holiday in the island paradise of Gozo, a tuffet of volcanic rock near Malta. I wasn’t keen to go but I felt I owed my wife a thank-you present for rearing our lusty little lad to the age of three without offering a single murmur of complaint — at least not while she’s asleep.

I researched our destination. In July the temperature of Gozo is about the same as the temperature of a forest fire. Photographs indicated that the island’s chief attraction (apart from eating couscous and watching jet-ski accidents) is a collection of poorly repaired churches. Gozo’s residents express themselves in Italian and Arabic, languages I don’t speak, so my conversational sallies would be limited to package-tour English. Sun hot. Tummy painful. Doctor quick.

I had a higher motive too. Spurred by manly pride, and a modicum of social embarrassment, I was determined to do battle with my fear of flying. The swiftest way to disempower a phobia, as we all know, is to embrace it and assimilate it by a simple process of habituation. Our flight was at noon. At 8.30 a.m. my wife was upstairs filling three suitcases with an edited version of her life’s complexities while I was down in the kitchen with little Isaac, searching for the perfect pre-flight stiffener. I poured half a litre of vodka into a plastic bottle and added a spoonful of orange juice. And there it was. A ‘screwdriver’, I believe it’s called. Fluids aren’t permitted on aeroplanes these days, apparently, so I necked the lot as our train bowled through south London towards Gatwick.

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