Stomach of Steel ©

I've always had a pretty good stomach when it comes to motion sickness: cars and buses are generally not a problem, although I do recall two carnival rides I have studiously avoided since my teens.

When I was fifteen, my school class travelled by boat to Great Keppel Island, and on the return journey, we boated straight into a humdinger of a storm (I'm pretty sure humdinger is not a nautically correct phrase.)

While a number of people were out the back of the boat heaving up with the heaving waves, I was out the front with a couple of other brave (or is that foolhardy) souls, yahooing and enjoying the ride.

I experienced no motion sickness when I travelled by plane.  My stepfather flew single engine planes as a hobby for a number of years. Whenever I had the opportunity, I would go flying with him, and not only was it good fun, it was also a terrific opportunity to spend time with him as well.

Twice I had the chance to be involved in competitions with his local flying club, where the pilots had to undertake particular tasks. These included things like dropping a flour bomb onto a target on the ground, or bursting a balloon with the plane. It was an enjoyable experience, and I never once felt motion sickness.

So it was rather surprising to suffer motion sickness in a rather unexpected place. A friend and I went along to see a new movie, and by the time we left a couple of hours later, I was feeling quite queasy, and my friend had at one point dashed into the gents to be violently ill.

It wasn't the content of the movies that had made us ill, rather it was watching a movie, filmed mostly using a hand-held camera, and then shown in an overly small theatre.

I felt like a bit of a dill to be honest – I mean, how many people do you know get motion sickness when they haven't even been in a moving vehicle?

Some time later I discovered that other people had experienced something similar in the same movie, and I didn't feel like quite such a freak any more, well no more than I usually do! ©