OMG! I was on THAT...?

Several moons ago on this very site, I posted my account of the Vampire "jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, head-spinning, sense-dimming" experience at Chessington World of Adventures, one that rendered me a quivering wreck for years afterwards. Ever the glutton for punishment, I have just graduated from the child-oriented Chessington to the adolescent version, Thorpe Park. Well, I am quivering again. In a nutshell, Thorpe Park has more OMG! moments than an Indiana Jones movie. My experiences included the Tidal Wave “one of Europe’s tallest water rides” and The Swarm (see left) “reaches a top speed of 59 km an hour” and beginning to end is the “same length as 175 Great White sharks” - seriously, did anyone ever measure a Great White shark? I endured a roasting on the Nemesis Inferno which “has a section with a zero-g roll where riders become weightless” - no wonder I felt light-headed when back upon beloved terra firma. And they were not the scariest rides! I could have gotten on (but did not) The Colossus which “pulls 4.2 g’s of G-force on its riders”. Or The Saw which “has a vertical drop, plummeting you at an angle of 100 degrees down a 100ft drop”. And The Stealth is “the tallest ride at Thorpe Park, at a staggering 62.5 m tall”. Guh! Guh! Guh! Seriously though, why do we love being scared? Personally, I put it all down to Edmund Burke and his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published 1757, in which the good philosopher tells us, in so many words, why we, er, love being scared. I quote: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible object, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is feeling.” In summary, you only feel truly alive when you come close to losing it all. And in the tame West, we need our theme parks and petrifying roller coasters. With the holidays coming to a close, I return willingly to the slower, gentler death of everyday life.
(Thorpe Parke, Chertsey Road, Surrey, is open daily. All quotations taken from its publicity material.)