Episode 05 - The Black Mountain

I have already confessed to the flying. In the interests of full disclosure, the flying is not the whole portfolio.

There is also heights. And, separately and much worse, bridges.

I want to be clear that these are three distinct conditions and not one condition wearing different hats. The flying is a fear of the machine, actually not a fear of flying, but of turbulence and ultimately crashing. Heights is a fear of the edge. Bridges are a fear of a specific and unanswerable question, which is: what exactly is holding this up, and has anyone checked recently.

I should add that I love to drive. I have a car that I love. And my love of driving is defined by two things, knowing the road and it being flat. A man who has been to more countries than he can reliably name, and can only drive himself to Sainsbury's or Waitrose. My father wanted me to be a civil engineer. I have instead

become a man who is driven across other people's engineering with his eyes shut. The trip was around the Balkans, which is where most of my trips have been, one way of another, for twenty-five years.

The problem arose between Montenegro and Croatia. There is no flight. There is, in theory, a flight, in the sense that there are two airports and an intervening distance, but the connection involves going a very long way in the wrong direction and arriving the following afternoon in a worse mood.

So: a car, and someone to drive it. I mentioned the plan to my wife with the airy confidence of a man who has not looked at a map. Would there, I wondered aloud, be mountains.

She did not look up. "It's called Montenegro for a reason."

Twenty-seven years of marriage, and she can still do that in under a second.

She was right, as she generally is and as she has never once needed to point out. The road climbs. It keeps climbing. It does so in a series of hairpins cut into the side of the mountain, with rock on one side and, on the other, a low stone wall of the kind that would be entirely adequate if what you were trying to contain was a determined sheep.

Below that, nothing. Below the nothing, eventually, the sea, doing its best to look picturesque about the whole thing which my driver repeatedly tried to get me to explore. I could not for two very important reasons. One, I was terrified to look. Two, I had a blindfold over my eyes that made me look like some

detained prisoner in a far-off land led by autocrats. My driver took the bends one-handed, at a speed I would describe as conversational, while conducting an actual conversation on his telephone. He was, I am certain, entirely competent. He had done this road several thousand times and I had done it never, and between us only one of us was sweating.

This is the single advantage of not driving. You are permitted to close your eyes. I closed them a great deal. I deployed the Chi Gung breathing, which is calibrated for a temple courtyard and not for a Yugoslav-era guardrail, and I held the handle above the door in the manner of a man who believes the handle is structural. We stopped at the top. A border crossing at the peak of the mountain was, in my view, somewhat intimidatory.

Crossing into an EU territory meant I had to get out at the top of the mountain to have my photo taken. The view was, objectively, one of the great views of Europe. I looked at it for as long as politeness required, in the manner of a man being shown photographs of a party he was not invited to and got back in the car.

And then the bridge. The Pelješac bridge is two and a half kilometres of road suspended over open sea, and it exists for a reason that ought to have endeared it to me. Croatia's coast is interrupted by a few miles of Bosnian shoreline at Neum. For years, driving from Dubrovnik to anywhere else in your own country meant two border posts and a queue. So, they built a bridge over the water and went round the outside. A sovereignty problem solved with concrete.

Twenty-five years of my professional life spent on such problems, and none of my solutions has ever been that elegant, or that permanent, or that easy to drive over at seventy. You see it long before you reach it, which is the cruelty of the thing. It sits out there in the light, improbably thin, a line drawn across open water by someone with more confidence than sense. There is an interval — several minutes, in my case — in which you are simply travelling towards your own phobia at a steady pace, in the passenger seat, with no controls of any kind in front of you. I closed my eyes at the first pylon and opened them somewhere on the peninsula. My driver said something I did not catch.

I have no idea what any of it looked like. I have been assured it is beautiful. Ivo Andrić, who won a Nobel Prize for a novel about a bridge, wrote that of everything a man builds nothing is better or worth more than a bridge. They belong to everyone. They are always built where the need is greatest. And unlike almost anything else we put up; they do not deceive.

He is right, and I resent him for it. He also never had to look down. There is a bridge a few hours inland from there that proves his point, and it is the only one I have ever been glad to stand on.

At Mostar the young men climb onto the parapet and throw themselves seventy- odd feet into the Neretva, which is freezing, for tips. They stand up there smoking, waiting for the crowd to thicken and the money to reach a level they consider appropriate. It is, in its way, a fee negotiation, and a more honest one than most I have been party to. That bridge was shelled to pieces in 1993, rebuilt stone by stone, and litigated afterwards at very great length, as everything here is eventually litigated. Which is Andrić's point turned the other way up. If a bridge is the thing that belongs to everyone, then destroying one is the clearest possible statement that some people are no longer included.

I have spent a career on the paperwork that follows. And I still cannot cross one with my eyes open. We came down into Croatia in the late afternoon, and I had a rakija on a terrace and my hands were, 1 am

pleased to report, more or less my own again.

Somewhere in there is the joke this series keeps arriving at from different directions. I am afraid of flying. I fly perhaps a hundred times a year. And after four hours of Montenegrin gradient and one bridge I refused

to look at, I sat there and thought, with total sincerity, the thing I never expected to think.

Give me a plane any day.

At least on a plane, nobody is expecting me to admire the view. They're boarding. More from the next one.