If, like me, you have never understood the attraction of paying to be scared witless by theme park rides, you might also experience a shameful twinge of schadenfreude when something goes mildly wrong on one. Nothing too awful, of course. Just the delight in seeing a fat adult stuck in a seat designed for children. Or a drunken yob vomiting down himself on a big dipper.
On Sunday, 17 people were stuck upside down for almost seven minutes when the all-spinning, all-whizzing Evolution ride at Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach ground to a halt. Now this wasn't funny. Children were screaming, adults saying their prayers. Thankfully, no one was badly hurt,which meant it wasn't in too bad taste to ask the question: just what does happen when you hang upside down for that long?
The author Dan Brown (yes, that one) actively likes to suspend himself bat-like in gravity boots, claiming it helps him work out the plotlines of his novels. But it's fair to say that Tracey Knowles wouldn't make the same decision given the choice. "It's absolutely awful," she says of her time stuck on the Evolution. "I was up there with my 16-year-old son Daniel and at first we thought stopping upside down for a moment might be part of the ride. But the minutes dragged on and I felt sick. Then as the blood rushed down, I felt my cheeks swell and thought my head would explode. Then I blacked out and came to on the ground with a crowd of people and an ambulance on the way. It was terrifying. I really thought I was going to die."
Knowles was taken to hospital and says she now has whiplash-like injuries, headaches and a swollen eye, but her reaction to the experience is unusual, according to Dr Martin Shalley, president of the British Association for Emergency Medicine.
"The body has various compensatory mechanisms for controlling the flow of blood," he says. "If you hang upside down, receptors around the heart detect which way gravity is forcing blood and send messages to the veins to constrict and push blood back. This should tend to even things up."
So, just in the way that Knowles should not have suffered such a bad reaction, Brown's gravity boots should not - some would argue, did not - really improve his plotlines.
Is there a lesson to be learned from the Great Yarmouth Evolution hiccup? If it is that people should think twice before going on fairground rides, then perhaps not. Britain's attractions are the safest in the world. Out of the millions of gut-wrenching jaunts taken in 2003/04, the last year for which full figures are available, only 100 resulted in serious injury.
On the other hand, I am reminded of the advice once given me by a venerable Fleet Street editor when discussing thrill-seeking enterprises. "In my experience," he said, "no one ever got hurt sitting by a warm fire with a nice glass of brandy."
