As far as phobias go, rollercoasters are probably not the worst things to be terrified of, writes Dan Wainwright.

Just because I don’t want to hurl my body around bends and upside down at absurd speeds with just a bit of plastic holding me down, it doesn’t mean I am hindered from doing the important things in life.

It’s not like I can’t go on holiday to a foreign country because I’m afraid of flying. And it’s not like I stand naked and trembling in the bathroom every time an eight legged creature emerges from the plughole.

Nonetheless I recently felt the need to confront an all consuming fear and find out if, in the end, the only thing I had to fear was fear itself. The short answer is no.

I had not been on a proper rollercoaster since the age of 16 – 11 years ago – when Codsall High School treated year 11 to a day at Alton Towers ahead of their GCSE study leave.

Being surrounded by a bunch of adolescents on a sugar high was not a fun experience and I felt the need to prove myself a man by queuing up for a century and allowing Oblivion to dangle me 90 feet in the air and hurtle me downwards in a blaze of orange and black, tinted with my own shade of self-loathing and brown-trousered fear.

Incredibly rides on Nemesis and Ripsaw followed, each just as terrifying and frightfully unnecessary.

You see there are some thrills I understand – paragliding for example, majestically soaring above the ocean with views that are out of this world. And while I wouldn’t want to do it I get how exciting it is to abseil and rock climb. The sense of achievement must match the adrenalin high.

But rollercoasters have no point that I can see. You just end up exactly where you started but a bit dizzier and at risk of losing the theme park-bought chips you took out a second mortgage for.

All those years on I found myself in Florida and at SeaWorld. Now I love that theme park. The dolphins, the killer whales – it’s brilliant. But there’s also Kraken.

At 149ft high and 65 miles an hour it was the last place in the world I wanted to be, right behind a sewage farm in summer close to a hospital where there’s been an outbreak of C-Difficile.

My party persuaded me to give it a go. As the harness came down around my shoulders I remember slowing my breathing, trying to remember that one-hour course in Buddhist meditation I took in Thailand which convinced me I was an expert, desperately attempting to calm down and becoming very stressed that I wouldn’t.

When the floor folded away and left my legs dangling that was it. The ride started to move and I was trapped, at the mercy of an American in a baseball cap in front of a set of levers.

I breathed all the way to the top of that sickening climb – and screamed all the way to the end. I’m serious. I was like a little girl who has just come home to find her brother has ripped off her Barbie doll’s head and replaced it with gum fashioned into a rude and amusing shape.

The result is the photo you see attached.

I must admit I was disappointed. I thought confronting my fear would lead me to embrace rollercoasters, to become an adrenaline junkie.

You read all these things about people who hated spiders then learned to confront them and went out to buy a tarantula farm.

Sadly confronting the rollercoaster just left me in the same position as when I was 16 – terrified and humiliated before my peers – only this time without the centre parting and hair that reached my earlobes.