Having been thwarted for the past two summers of fulfilling my plan to get off my backside and see more of France, I am now ready for the off.

The car has had its first service since I bought it; two new tyres have been fitted and I've rediscovered long forgotten smart clothes which will replace the Balignac rags I crawl into most days.

The clothes even fit – well, so long as I wear the hold-everything-in swimsuit that acts as a 1930s binding across the bosom and a 1950s corset across the stomach.

I have ditched the Spanx ever since my back went into agonising spasm attempting to get into them while lying flat on my bed, pressing feet into the headboard.

Who needs Fifty Shades Of Grey and a sadistic, gorgeous young millionaire when you can have half-an-hour of torture pulling up a pair of knickers and several further hours wearing them? (I do not understand S&M, obviously.)

My main excursion is in two weeks' time, to the Luberon, the setting of Peter Mayle's A Year In Provence. I'm staying with friends in their 17th-century hunting lodge where King Louis XV frequently stayed and for a few days will be cossetted and kept in the manner I hope to attain in my next life.

I'm free and ready to go as Heather's sister is moving into Las Molieres to look after Portia who is back to form, albeit with three working legs and one that skitters around like Jake the Peg's.

It's a fairly straightforward drive – around six hours – and ideally I would throw everything in the boot and just leave. Before coming here I wouldn't have thought twice about the drive but as my world has shrunk my once semi-controlled phobias have grown.

Unfortunately, most seem fixated on driving. I cannot overtake lorries on curves (in fact I cannot overtake anything on a curve); I cannot overtake tractors on roads with ditches (every road here); I have problems with raised bits of roads because I'm convinced the car is tipping over; I cannot go over big bridges; and I most certainly cannot climb hills or mountains with big, BIG drops on the side. I will sweat, get slower and slower, grabbing the wheel in a rictus clinch, and feel the magnetic pull of the drop, certain my car is doing a sideways glide to a Thelma And Louise finale.

At that point I will stop, becoming a danger to myself and others as I refuse to move – or even get out of the car. This is not good for my tour de France.

Emails elicited that the house is high on a mountain reached by very scary hairpin bends and long, long drops into nothingness.

Although I once believed in facing one's fears, I no longer do. My train ticket is booked. I will be met at Avignon, an hour away from the house and ferried by a driver who will pretend to understand my fears but truly hasn't a clue.

Nor do I. In what's left of my functioning brain I know my car won't slip-slidey away. I won't turn over on bad cambers; I won't find myself steering the car into an abyss as if compelled.

These feelings or suggestions began after pregnancy, when while turning on a hill in Paisley I felt I would slide sideways all the way down. Hormonal, obviously.

In Disneyworld many years later I observed it was always women who were sitting awaiting children on the benches outside the high rides. Chatting to them I discovered we were all ashamed of our new fears; many of us had been fearless riders, skiers, drivers. What happened to us? I've never met one man who has admitted such. I don't think it's a macho thing, it just doesn't seem happen to them in the same way. There must be an academic paper on this.

Yet I refuse to be limited. Perhaps it is an ear thing. Perhaps there is a simple cure of the old syringe. I'm sure I have tinnitus – only aware of it in the deep silence of the countryside – and some days I get out of bed and everything swims.

Of course, the ostrich I am, I do not make use of the fabulous French system for which I am now paying almost €70 a month for my top-up insurance to uncover this.

But I will, I will, because I can no longer hear the crunch of cars on my gravel; the chirruping of the cicadas; the croaks of the frogs or any aliens who may land. Worse I can no longer tune in to conversations at other people's tables in restaurants while conducting my own.

Meanwhile, it's the train. Having not been on a French train in years I am now surfing the net to find pictures of trains in stations.

I'm not sure I should be doing this, because I may well end up staying at home. You see another little phobia of mine is crossing the gap between station platform and train. If the train is high and I can see the track below, I'm done for.

Perhaps I should take the bus. n

cookfidelma@hotmail.com