Why emotional rollercoasters make me sick: writes craig brown 

This has been another bumper season for rollercoasters. When Fearne Cotton left Radio 1 after nearly ten years, she said: ‘It’s only now I can look back on it all as a chunk of time and a

rollercoaster chapter of my life.’ On the very same day, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, delivered a Ted Talk on How To Manage The Emotional Rollercoaster Of Creativity.

Over on the other side of the world, in Melbourne, Australia, Lorenzo ‘Lozzy’ Schiavello, the son of a reality TV star called Lydia Schiavello, has been in court pleading guilty to stalking

a woman. Over a 24-hour period, he sent her 11 text messages, 12 private inbox messages on Facebook and 18 naked photos. His defence lawyer argued that, at the time, Schiavello had been

‘riding a rollercoaster of emotions’. Meanwhile, Sam Faiers, one of the stars of The Only Way Is Essex, has just published a memoir, Secrets And Lies, in which she writes of her time with

her reality TV co-star Joey Essex. ‘When we were good, we were really good. When I look back at our relationship, I would describe it as a romantic rollercoaster. We enjoyed the same food

and holidays, but when it was bad, it was so bad.’  RELATED ARTICLES On Twitter, too, there have been rollercoasters galore. ‘Swimming makes me cry. Swimming makes me laugh. Swimming makes

me sad. Swimming makes me happy. It takes me on a rollercoaster of emotions,’ tweets someone, or something, called Swimming Is Me. Others are less specific as to what it is about their lives

that makes them seem like a rollercoaster. ‘My life is a rollercoaster,’ reads one tweet. ‘Life is a rollercoaster: enjoy the moment while it lasts,’ reads another. In recent years, the

rollercoaster has overtaken the nightmare as the great catch-all symbol to employ whenever life goes a tiny little bit wrong. In the old days, you used to hear people say: ‘It was a

NIGHTMARE! I wanted cod and chips — but they only had haddock!’ But now they say: ‘I wanted cod and chips — but they only had haddock! It was a ROLLERCOASTER!’ Rollercoasters crop up in the

most unlikely places, not all of them low-brow. The last place you might expect to come across a rollercoaster is in Claire Tomalin’s great biography of Samuel Pepys, but here it is, on page

13, when she writes about ‘the religious rollercoaster of the previous century, when successive Tudor monarchs first overthrew the Catholic Church, set up Protestantism, restored

Catholicism and then settled into uneasy compromise under Elizabeth . . .’ Even the most sober, starchy commentators have started to ride on rollercoasters. In March, after the Chancellor

had delivered his last Budget before the General Election, no less a figure than the chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility announced ‘public services spending is on a

rollercoaster profile through the next Parliament’. Nowadays, there is virtually nothing that cannot be compared to a rollercoaster. A fortnight after the rollercoaster Budget, the

supermodel Malaika Firth talked about her rollercoaster profession to The Guardian. ‘I wish I had known how much pressure there would be. I’d have been able to prepare myself better. From

the outside it all looks so easy, but the days can be frickin’ long, and sometimes you see some girls at the end of the shoot thinking: “Oh my gosh, I’m tired”.’ All in all, it is, she

concluded, ‘a frickin’ roller- coaster’. One of the great pioneers of the rollercoaster was the busty former glamour model Katie Price, who has fallen back on the term in all five of her

autobiographies. ‘My marriage was over. It ended when Pete left me. The last few months had been such a rollercoaster for me, with the pain of the break-up and then falling in love with

Alex,’ she writes in her fourth book, You Only Live Once. Her introduction to her fifth memoir, Love, Lipstick And Lies, observes: ‘As usual with me, the three years since my last book have

been a rollercoaster ride. There’s always drama with a capital D in my life.’ Small wonder that, in an open letter to her next husband, Alex was driven to write: ‘Dear Kieran, You’re now

officially on the Katie Price rollercoaster ride.’ Real-life rollercoaster rides last just a few minutes and return you safe and sound to the same place from which you set out. They may

leave you with a few hairs out of place, but otherwise the world remains the same. It seems odd, then, that they are used quite so regularly to describe periods of high drama that often take

place over a number of years, even decades. Sometimes it seems that the only thing no one ever compares to a rollercoaster is a rollercoaster. But it is on a roll, and there’s no stopping

it.