LITMIR.BIZ

       G is for … Gamophobia

      I am not the only one to suffer from fear of flying. The list of famous aviophobes is long and distinguished: Twiggy, who takes Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy for it (it’s never worked for me); Stanley Kubrick, who had to recreate the Vietnam War in Pinewood because of it; Dennis Bergkamp, the Arsenal and Dutch player who leaves several days ahead of the rest of his team to get to European matches, plus some American female rock star who can’t tour because of it but whose name, unfortunately, I can’t remember. On behalf of all of them, I’d like to ask – and particularly of Bad Ponytail Peter who insists it must be cured – what is so damn phobic about being scared of being locked up in some aluminium tube half a mile in the air, and this in the full knowledge that any moment some crazy might take over the cockpit or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull do a nose dive into one of the engines. From this you will deduce I don’t regard fear of flying as remotely phobic. To me aviophobia is like ballistophobia (fear of bullets and missiles) or lilapsophobia (fear of hurricanes and tornados) or nucleomituphobia (fear of nuclear weapons), all of which are on Bad Ponytail Peter’s list, and all – as far as I can see – utterly inapplicable as phobias since they concern things which by their very nature only a complete idiot would not be scared of.

      I feel much the same way about gamophobia.

      Fear of marriage.

      I used to think I was some sort of oddity, some beast with a brand on my forehead with regard to my gamophobia but now I don’t think so. Tell you the truth, I think that, as a condition, it’s getting as common as measles. For a start, people are putting it off. The average age for marriage now is thirty for men, twenty-eight for women, a rise of five years over the last quarter of a century.* The way things are going, in fifty years’ time, people will be hitting the big four-oh before they clamber into their wedding clobber.

      As much as anything, of course, this has to do with the increased social acceptance of cohabiting instead of, or prior to, marriage. A quarter of the nation is now shacked up without benefit of clergy – or Living In Sin as my mother prefers to call it – a figure expected to double over the next ten years. As a result of this more than forty per cent of the nation’s babies are now born to cohabiting couples, a ten per cent rise over the last decade. Cue a bout of enthusiastic tutting from my mother when she read it in her morning paper.

      ‘All those children born out of wedlock.’

      ‘Out of wedlock. For God’s sake, you’ll be saying “wrong side of the blanket” next. We’re not living in a Catherine Cookson novel, Mother.’

      Meanwhile there’re no prizes for guessing just why society got a taste for cohabitation as opposed marriage. It’s because it’s not marriage, that’s why. Because it’s not quite that final. Because it represents a resting place, a place to draw breath, to hold back, think twice. A place where there’s still a let-out clause, a light still shining at the end of the tunnel. All the marriage-shy spinster does, as usual, is raise her head that bit higher above the parapet.