Some features of a place are so iconic that they become inextricably linked to the totality of the tourist experience: like climbing the Eifel Tower when you’re in Paris; visiting the Colosseum when you’re in Rome, or being shot and stabbed in the face when you’re in Airdrie.

Take Blackpool. If you think ‘Blackpool’ you might very well think about piers, donkeys, rollercoasters, dead entertainers, postcard kitsch, alcoholic armageddon, or trams, but the very first image to assail your mind will probably be the tower; it’s the thing that makes Blackpool indelibly ‘Blackpool’.

Blackpool without the tower is like fish without chips, yin without yang, Ant without De… OK, well, maybe not that last one.

Simply put, if you ‘do’ Blackpool without the tower, then you haven’t done Blackpool, my friend.

My family and I went on a short holiday there earlier this year. All that being said, there was no way I wasn’t doing the tower, right? It was a slam-dunk. Impossible to avoid. Just one snag, though: I’m a lily-livered, height-phobic fraidy-cat. As far as my adrenal gland is concerned a Ferris Wheel is the size of Jupiter, and the Blackpool Tower is two burning World Trade Centre towers stacked on top of the Empire State Building stacked on top of the mountains of Mordor.

Our kids were there with us, which changed things somewhat. I couldn’t deprive them of a chance to gaze across the ocean from the tower’s peak; and, more importantly, I couldn’t let them see me – their big hairy dad – quaking with pant-crapping terror.

We lose the luxury of our fears and phobias once we’ve got kids. Every spasm or moan or wobble or flip-out risks cursing them to mimic and then internalise the very worst and weakest points of your psychology. If you can’t exorcise your fear – and you probably can’t, at least not without a long, intensive course with a behavioural psychologist – then the trick is to hide it; put on the acting performance of your life so as not to overwrite the roadmap of your children’s nervous system with your own spaghettified neuroses: smile a grinding, rictus grin below bulging, terrified eyes, as you mutter reassuring sentiments by rote like a ventriloquist dummy with a phone jammed to its ear and a gun held to its head.

I haven’t always been afraid of heights. I remember as a child being quite the little daredevil. I also remember being in the backseat of our family car as it zig-zagged up the narrow, treacherous, precipice-fringed roads of the Pyrenees, staring dispassionately down into oblivion, as my mother shook and cried and wailed in the front seat like an Arab mother at a funeral. Maybe we inherit some of our fear; maybe as we get older and closer to death we become more acutely aware of the myriad ways we could meet it.

Mercifully, the Blackpool Tower wasn’t the first item on our itinerary. I had time to mentally prepare myself. Actually, that wasn’t a mercy at all. In reality I had time to build my fear into a fortress, complete with machine-gun turrets and flying tigers. Every day until the day of our fateful meeting, the tower stared at me across the sky: leering; jeering; taunting. Jutting into the sky like a great gravestone. ‘You can try to ignore me,’ it said. ‘But I’m here. And you’ll be here, too. Eventually. We both know it. You can’t escape it, my friend.’

I wasn’t going to be beaten by this vast, inanimate son-of-a-bitch. This towery bastard. Was I? No. I couldn’t let it beat me. But how could I possibly win? I had a less-than- impressive track record of winning fights against heights since reaching adulthood.

I’d like to submit into evidence the following incident: Paris.

I’d gone there with an ex-girlfriend many years ago, facing an almost identical dilemma to the one I would later face in Blackpool. You can’t do Paris without the Eiffel Tower, so you’ve no choice but to climb it.

So I climbed it.

Or tried to.

I say climbed.

The elevator that took visitors from the ground to the first floor was packed with children and other smiling bastards, who were all somehow actually excited at the prospect of being lifted into the sky high enough that if they dropped they would all die. As the elevator began its ascent my mouth began its descent into the foulest, most nightmarish filth ever uttered by a human being.

“Jamie, your language,” chided my girlfriend. “The children?”

“They’re all fucking French,” I said, “They’ve no idea what I’m saying.”

Another volley of fear propelled a fresh salvo of extra-spicy swears out through my mouth and into the air. What air was left after I’d finished hyper-ventilating, that is.

The first floor of the Eiffel Tower was fine, I suppose, if you’re content to describe as ‘fine’ a man who tip-toes ridiculously about the place like Joe 90 doing a space-walk as all around him children skip and run and laugh. I felt towards the edge of the platform like a blind-man suffering the DTs, and unfortunately found it. I slipped my fingers through the grating, as a guest at Guantanamo Bay would the walls of his cage, and peered down at the ground far, far, far below. I felt my heart da-doyng up into my throat, and my legs turn to jelly beneath me. “This is nice,” I said through gritted teeth, wearing the face of a gorilla who’d been found dead on a mountain-top after being kicked out of a plane.

We waited in the queue for the second elevator that would this time take us to the viewing platform at the very tip of the tower. Half-way to the front of the queue I buckled and bottled, and had to walk away, slowly and awkwardly, a pirate with MS losing his sea-legs, a defated man limping off into the future…

2018. We looked up at the Blackpool Tower.

My kids were excited.

“Are you sure about this?” asked my partner.

“Yes,” I lied. “Yes I am.”

Before I could fully activate my fear centre and adrenal gland, we first had to buy tickets from the pleasant girl at main reception. She was smiling. Why was she smiling? A little incongruous I thought. When a prisoner’s being led from his cell on death row to the electric chair, good customer service isn’t high up on his list of priorities.

“Thanks for using the State of Alabama Correctional Facilities Death Row Chair Number 3, Old Smoky in the vernacular, voted the Killiest Electrified Chair in Death Row Monthly’s state-sponsored execution awards six years’ running. If you could just take a moment or two to fill out our customer satisfaction card before you start convulsing in your very final terror and agony…”

I smiled back at the receptionist: the closed-lipped, stretch-mouthed grimace of the condemned man. She just smiled back all the harder, probably wondering if I was mental.

Because I’d never been inside the Blackpool Tower building I was unfamiliar with its layout. This was both a blessing and a curse. I had no idea exactly which set of stairs or which creaky elevator would lead me up into the tower itself. Our journey through the building placed my heart and mouth on a heady see-saw of panic and peace. At least the kids were there to distract me. It’s hard to surrender to terror when you’re busy trying to prevent two little humans from slapping each other in the face.

Up stairs, in lifts, along corridors, we – and some other groups of people – eventually arrived at a 4D cinema (the fourth D is having water sprayed in your face) where we had to watch a tower-themed promo video, which for some reason my eldest boy – then three – found more terrifying than anything else he’s experienced before or since.

We all spilled out of the cinema and trickled down the corridors, all of us travelling in the same direction, but none of us entirely sure why and, most crucially, where. A few right-angles later, we arrived at a small corridor, two lifts marking its limits. One of our number hit the call-button, while the rest of us stood by the walls or sat down on the floor with our kids, huddled together like refugees.

The lift opened, and we shuffled in. I figured we were heading for another floor, perhaps this time to sit through twenty minutes of juggling. We couldn’t be heading up to the tower, because our embarkment was too unceremonious. Surely there would have been at the very least a member of staff to lead us on our way – I don’t know: a lift attendant or something?

I nodded at the lift attendant as the doors closed behind us.

I noticed two things: one, that he was wearing a reasonably ceremonious uniform. And, two, his hand was resting on a switch.

My brain tried to hold reality at bay with all of its panicked might.

I kept nodding at the lift attendant, so intently that I almost slipped into a hypnotic fugue. I was certainly entranced enough not to immediately realise that one of my nods was actually an involuntary lurch caused by the lift starting to climb.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see girders dropping from sight, one after the other, then sky, then the tops of buildings, then road, then sea…

The lift attendant was talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t hear anything above the rising cauldron of my panic; the blood whipping and roaring and lashing in ferocious waves against the cliffs of my skull. I stared straight at him, straight into his eyes, anything to avoid looking at the view to my left, the sea, the soaring sky, the tiny little people, getting tinier by the second, and then… out of the corner of my other eye, I saw something that as a bona fide scared person I was absolutely bloody delighted to see.

Someone who was even more scared than me!

My own fear had blinded me to his presence at first, but there he was, not even brave enough to eye-ball the attendant, hunched against the non-see-through portion of the lift, eyes closed, moaning softly. He was a little older than me, a fellow Scot, and though I felt some compassion for his plight, I drew great strength from his even greater misery.

I clapped him on the back and started wise-cracking.

Me, the mighty warrior, conquering the tower. LOOK AT THAT BRAVE FACE!

He was my cure. I actually rather enjoyed being at the top of the tower, and I’ve definitely got this guy to thank. Within a few minutes I was tap-dancing over the Perspex floor in the viewing gallery, oblivion just a few inches beneath my feet, as I watched him struggle to walk down an ordinary corridor without being pushed and propelled from behind by his kids.

“Come on, sweetheart,” I heard his wife say, “If that guy can do it, so can you.”

In your FACE, fraidy-cat!

My kids had a brilliant time, not a hint of fear or apprehension on their features as they looked down through the floor, or gazed out the windows, or walked up the steps to the very, very peak of the tower to peer through the gratings. The next day I even went on the Ferris Wheel.

Blackpool: I fucking own you. CN tower?: I’m coming for you, bitch.

We also visited Madame Tussauds. See the, em, rather disturbing pictures here.