PEOPLE look at me like I’m mad when I say I’m scared of butterflies.

They say ‘How can you be scared of something so beautiful and fragile?’ But it’s not just butterflies – it’s anything that flaps.

Watch Catherine in the human gyroscope

So walking through town, I am constantly watching out for low-flying pigeons, and I’m already worried about September because that’s when the daddy longlegs come out.

They’re the worst. They’re spiders with wings.

So when I got the chance to have a session on the Holigral Ark Angle I was keen to give it a go and get rid of my phobia.

The Ark Angle looks like one of those wacky fairground rides you might see at the end of a pier in Blackpool.

It appears quite simple in design: a racing car seat held held in the middle of a rotating metal circle.

There is a big handle to one side which your facilitator spins to put you into different positions.

Bartholomeus NE Kalshoven – the Dutch managing director of the Holigral company – strapped me in place and began to ask me about my problem with flying creatures.

He moved me into different positions to ‘unlock’ memories of my childhood when the problem might have started.

I began to think back to when there wasn’t a problem such as when I used to feed the ducks in the park with my dad I was asked to recall what clothes I would have worn as a 10-year-old, what I did, and what was happening in my life.

I remembered that at that time – summer 1995 – our family moved house away from my childhood friends, which meant in a year’s time I would be going to a high school where I wouldn’t know anyone.

Bartholomeus said that any anxiety I had connected to moving house and leaving friends, I had then linked to things with wings – especially butterflies, as it was summer.

To gauge my reaction, he spun me round and round and put me into different positions to see if I could ‘remeasure a measure’ of anxiety.

He said it was now possible to look at a childhood fear at an adult way, and then conquer it.

I got out of the machine feeling slightly more calm, but wondering if this kind of rotating counselling could really work.

So did it? Time will tell, but as I walked out of the Mall and into King William Street, a scruffy old fat pigeon hobbled over in my direction and my first reaction was to jump out of the way with a little squeal.