Park Life: High-anxiety parenting

IT WAS our son Tom's 11th birthday and, within reason, he could choose whatever treat he liked. So it came about that the four of us, plus three of Tom's friends, slogged up Everest and down again last Sunday, after a large Chinese meal, in a special-effects cinema which made you feel you were really there - a sort of 3D without the silly glasses.

This was not the ideal wet weekend fare for someone terrified of heights, such as myself. Early on in the film, while tracing the climbers' training sessions, the combination of trick photography and special effects sent us viewers flying off a track along the edge of a canyon in Idaho, then left us dangling from a sheer rock-face hundreds of feet above the churning sea, then hurtling down a bottomless crevasse in the foothills of the Himalayas.

A good deal of the enjoyment for Tom and his friends, whom he had briefed in advance on my delicate condition, was to watch my appalled reaction to these head-spinning aerial sequences, and the urgent whisper of "Look at Dad" that trickled along the row was all that kept my composure.

Likewise, Tom was hugely amused at his mother's tears when the inevitable tragedy struck - in this case, we eavesdropped on a climber trapped in a storm near the summit, talking by radio with his seven-months-pregnant wife at home in New Zealand a couple of hours before certain death. Oh, the maudlin sentimentality of adults: tough 11-year-olds cry only at really important things, such as not being allowed to watch Top of the Pops.

But I cannot believe Tom chose this treat only to torture his parents. Perhaps - and this is even worse - mountain-climbing is in his blood or his genes or whatever it is that transmits these tastes in a family.

If so, it has skipped a generation. My mother and father may not have in fact met on a mountain-top, but they certainly spent as much time as possible up mountains in their early years together. I vividly remember them departing on what they had announced would be their last ever climbing trip, shortly before my second sister was born: leaving two orphans, the logic went, would be regrettable; three orphans was irresponsible.

They were right to stop, of course, because the odds are stacked against mountaineers surviving for long. Every year or so, my father would come home with grim news: "Tony was killed last week. A rock fall on the Zugspitz - he did not stand a chance. They have four children".

But even after they had reluctantly given up climbing, my parents would regale us with tales from the mountains, which must have come to represent a golden age of youthful freedom to them. There was the fellow climber who could down pints of beer all night and then power up vertical cliffs all day, fuelled only by fruit-and-nut bars; another who lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but carried on climbing regardless.

My father, who once took 18 months to put up a simple shelf for the telephone, accomplished in one weekend the far more complicated task of building a lookout platform for me in our conker tree, when I was about eight. I do not remember having to nag him to put it up; in fact I think the impetus came from him, quite unbidden. Whether or not he meant to introduce me to the thrill of heights in this way, the experiment ultimately failed.

Not straightaway, though: I climbed trees quite happily as a child, and did not even particularly worry when I fell out a couple of times. But at some stage in that complicated period known as adolescence, I became convinced that I suffered from vertigo.

I do not know whether its origin was neurotic, or whether the climbing gene inherited from my parents was overwhelmed by a late-developing heights- are-terrifying gene picked up from some earlier ancestor, but the conviction has never left me. My first and only business partnership - as a window- cleaner, one summer holiday when I was 17 - broke up after only a week over my point-blank refusal to climb a ladder and administer to upstairs panes.

Since then, I have made an exhibition of myself at the top of tall buildings including St Paul's Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, hugging a wall or even lying on the floor in a state of frenzied fear.

But I have never been near the top of a mountain, and I hope that Tom stays well clear of them, too. If he shows signs of mountain-lust as he gets older, I will just have to buy him a motorbike to encourage him to court danger in a safer manner.