The bravest person at Thorpe Park wasn't me

Thorpe Park is a theme park about an hour outside London, home to some of the most aggressive rollercoasters in the UK. It is not for the faint-hearted. We are both, it turns out, slightly faint-hearted.

I went into Thorpe Park thinking I had the measure of the day. Big rides, long queues, overpriced food. I'd done the mental preparation and importantly all the planning. I knew which rides to take down to the exact detail, to put it mildly I was ready.

What I hadn't prepared for was the first forty-five minutes of near silence from the my girlfriend next to me.

She'd gone quiet almost immediately after we arrived. I did what any emotionally intelligent partner would do: I assumed it was about me. I ran a quick internal audit of recent wrongdoings, found several candidates, and quietly braced for a conversation I didn't want to have while in the hyperia queue while simultaneously saying outloud "you know we can't be in silence for the whole day".

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise she wasn't annoyed. She was terrified.

She'd been nervous the whole drive over. Nervous through the entrance. Nervous through the queue. I'd been so busy being oblivious that I'd missed all of it, right up until the restraints came down on the first ride and I caught her face, tears in her eyes and understood, suddenly and completely, that I had been an idiot.

I grabbed her hand. Told her it would all be fine. That the ride was safe, that she'd love it, that I wasn't remotely worried.

All of this was a lie. I was extremely worried. About the ride specifically. I have a complicated relationship with the point at which a rollercoaster tips over the edge and commits, which I have never fully disclosed to anyone and did not plan to start disclosing today.

But here we were.

Hyperia is the tallest rollercoaster in the UK. It is not subtle about this. The ascent gives you time to think, which is the last thing you want. What followed, for me, involved some sounds I won't fully describe, a sincere and private conversation with God, and a significant amount of internal negotiation about whether I was fine, which I was not.

I turned to her at the end, still collecting myself, expecting to find the same wreckage.

She was beaming.

Can we go again?

I laughed and said we'd have to queue. What I meant was: I need a moment.

The rest of the day was genuinely brilliant. She was transformed, energised, happy, up for everything. I was grateful, relieved, and quietly working through what had just happened to me on that first drop.

We didn't talk about any of it until the car home. That's when I told her I'd thought she was being off with me. She told me she'd been trying not to cry before Hyperia. We both admitted, in the way you do when the day is done and it's safe to, that we'd been holding it together for the other one.

It turned out she wasn't the only one who needed their hand held.

Thorpe Park was excellent. Get there early, do the big rides first, accept that the food will cost what it costs. But more than any of that, pay attention to the person next to you. They might be telling you something without saying a word.

I nearly missed it entirely.