I look at it on the weekends I spend in Sydney with my fiancée, its grey skeleton mocking me. I have friends who have climbed it. "It's easy," they say with the sickening insouciance of those who are able to climb stepladders and change lightbulbs without clinging to the ceiling like a spider, knees banging together in fear. I've been offered a free trip to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge's lofty heights by my future father-in-law and have replied with a succession of excuses, each flimsier than the one before.

It's genetic. As I type this, my father sits at home with his own demons. He and Mum are having a week's holiday on the Gold Coast, but the apartment they usually rent on the eighth floor isn't available and they've had to take one on the ninth. People who have no fear of heights don't realise the significance of this. That is an entire storey higher. Even on the eighth floor, Dad can't stand in the living room and look out over the ocean without feeling the pull of that hypnotic force which draws vertigo sufferers helplessly towards the edge. Ensconced on the ninth, he'll be feeling his way around the edge of the living room like a crab, both hands gripping the wall.

In a moment of insanity, I went on a ferris wheel once. It almost had completed two entire loops before the operator heard my screams and stopped the ride, by which time I was getting ready to jump.

In an attempt to overcome my terror of climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I've even entered a training program and, on a recent weekend, seized by madness, agreed to take a ride on a flying fox. This may not seem particularly adventurous but, within my terms of reference, it equates with climbing Mt Everest in a pair of thongs and without ropes.

"Are you feeling all right?" asked the young female attendant charged with hooking me on to the steel cable on which I would glide several hundred metres to the other side. Torn between a desire to visit the bathroom or to throw up, I had difficulty answering.

Then I remembered the previous night when I had attempted to light a campfire. Did I mention my mates and I went camping? It always ends in disaster and invariably produces yet another tale of unsurpassed idiocy. One moment the flames were just beginning to take hold and the next I was crouching there wide-eyed and black-faced with smoke curling off my eyebrows, eyelashes and head, the air heavy with the smell of burning hair.

   "It was the fire," I explained to the girl. "It singed my hair."
   "No," she said. "I was talking about your face. It's turned green."