An old chum with a neat turn of phrase but absolutely no respect for his elders and betters describes me as “about as upwardly mobile as an outing to Grimes Graves”.

That’s one of the oldest industrial sites in Europe, an extensive group of flint mines dating back to the late Neolithic period about 4,000 years ago.

They had to make their own entertainment those days  at Weeting in deepest Breckland, seven miles north-west of trendy Thetford.

Miners used antler picks to extract high quality flint.

One of these mines remains open to the public although, for safety reasons, visitors are not allowed to crawl along the tunnels. It is possible to climb right down the shaft and see seven radiating galleries.

I declined a chance to descend into Norfolk’s glorious past on a school field trip a few hundred terms ago.

Fear of heights had been freely advertised in the gym as my scrawny frame shivered at the bottom of dangling ropes and mountainous wall bars.

Now “scaredy-cat Skipper taunts plumbed fresh depths as I peered down a hole and went all giddy.

A small amount of self-respect was salvaged with a line designed to enhance my growing reputation as the class jester – “You won’t catch me knapping, Sir!”  - but rampant aversion to life’s highs and lows set me apart as someone bound to struggle to make sense of that seam in the middle.

I learnt much later that the delightful label “bathophobia”  is attached to fear of deep or dark spaces bringing on dizzy spells and panic attacks.

I suffered several of those just before algebra and geometry tests. Posh word for fear of heights is acrophobia.

I have always stuck to Vertigo since watching James Stewart shudder and shake in the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film of that name.

Many indiscretions along Great Yarmouth’s Golden Mile during Sunday school outings in the 1950s included  a bold march to top of the helter-skelter and discovering it was far higher than a farmyard stack.

After peering at wriggling  dots across the sands and turning a strange colour.

I hastily organised my own passing-out parade and slinked meekly down all those steps to hand in my unused coconut mat.

Shame compounded by a grinning attendant offering thrippence back  for the worst impression of Edmund Hillary he’d ever seen, Nearly as bad as the boating lake disaster culminating in man on the microphone announcing with no hint oof sympathy “; “Come in number six, your time is up – and so are the disaster flares!”.

My efforts were hardly oar-inspiring but there was no need to underline my landlubber pedigree in such a public manner.

My first solo trip to London in the early 1960s brought a tricky encounter with those moving staircases  in the underground, just as unnerving as roaring traffic above where crossing a road for a true provincial could prove a chance to make friends for life with a few others waiting to do the same.

On reflection, those capital delights should have prepared me for the sheer joy of shopping in Norwich stores  and staying relatively safe during peak holiday time when traffic takes over in the middle of Cromer and several other seaside haunts.

You’ll probably guess I did not turn green with envy recently when billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first non- professional astronaut to take a walk in space. It did revive memories of listening to the good old wireless when Jet, Doc, Mitch and Lemmy left us with a cliffhanger at end of each instalment of Journey Into Space.

Running from 1953 until 1958, it was the last UK radio programme to attract a bigger evening audience than television.

Dick Barton and Paul Temple kept my feet firmly on the ground while following the detective trail and totting up  clues.

I managed to overcome fear of flying in 1983 for our honeymoon in Southern Ireland. On that same flight, golfing stars Severiano Ballesteros and Curtis Strange headed for the Irish Open Championship. I should have played a hunch and put a fiver on winner Seve

For all its up and downs, life in dear old Norfolk still has much to commend it  and I may yet scale the north face of Beeston Bump to look down on the Shannocks to see how far their town is spreading, . join the grandchildren on a bouncy castle and the dodgems  and look into the county’s deepest potholes to find out what  Neolithic times were really like.

That should give this medicated follower of fashion more of an overdue upwardly mobile image.