A helium balloon horse once tried to seduce me

And why we anthropomorphise.

For an audio version and the pleasure of hearing the effort it takes for me to say ‘anthropomorphise’ - click here.

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We were replacing the spare room bed with a sofa bed and so listed it on an online marketplace for free. In just a few hours we had a taker. Right before they came to pick it up I discovered a previously hidden sentimentality for the bed. It was just a cheap pine frame from Argos with a sagging mattress but my sister had passed it on to me 16 years ago so suddenly it felt the closest we had to a family heirloom.

The man that picked it up was perfectly nice with nothing to indicate anything untoward. But that night I lay awake panicking that he was a sex trafficker and the bed had been taken to some damp, infested, bleak room full of misery where terrible things were going to happen. And the bed would be sitting there thinking,

“What happened? What did I do wrong? I thought I was part of the family. Did I start creaking? I didn’t mean to creak. If she’d just said, I could have tried to stop creaking. I’m so cold. And damp. And lonely. I can hear someone crying. Maybe she’ll come back. Annabel! Annabel! She’s not coming.”

Then I remembered how cold and damp our spare bedroom is and that there’s a lot of crying in my house too and realised the bed probably didn’t even notice. And went to sleep.

I know I’m not alone in this kind of behaviour. But why do we do it to ourselves? You could easily argue that we are trained from an early age to think this way. An average childhood is filled with anthropomorphised animals, cars, trains, robots, bananas, snowmen and Weetabix. (The last one is only if you were a child of the Eighties and therefore familiar with the skin-headed, bovver-booted Weetabix gang. A bit weird in retrospect. I do a very good impression of how they used to say ‘Okay?’. Audio listeners will have this little treat.)

So it’s very normal when you’re younger, but it’s not something that many of us outgrow. Nicholas Epley is a leading researcher in this area and has a lot to say. I trust it all as he’s a professor at the University of Chicago and that’s the one Indiana Jones studied at.

He proposed that this desire for anthropomorphising is caused by loneliness and a need for control. I asked my partner, Tom, if he thought I was controlling and spend too much time alone. He responded immediately with,

“Yes. Very much so. Highly. Extraordinarly highly. On both counts.”

I felt he had more to say and was thrilled at this apparent open opportunity to criticise me so I stopped him there. I’d got the picture.

So perhaps Epley is right about this. He also believes it could be a sign of social intelligence. This has not yet been proved but there’s never been a sign before that I have social intelligence so this is very exciting.

I now feel ready to share my helium horse balloon experience. Remember, if you’re not one to name a car or talk to a teddy or feel sorry for the only uneaten pea – those of us who do were brainwashed as a child and are socially intelligent. (Let’s not get bogged down in the lonely and controlling stuff.) Here we go.

For my son’s fourth birthday party, I went all out and bought a big canister of helium and lots of balloons. This was in part to make up for the fact we were having the celebration in our small front garden and only five children were invited.

I got some animal head helium balloons and also some animal ones with feet, which weigh them down enough so they kind of walk around on the ground. I’m aware that I’m not describing them very well so here are some terrible photos.

If anybody wants a birthday party photographer, don’t let me know. To be fair to me, I didn’t realise what a big part one of these balloons would later play in my life. If I had, I would’ve taken many more pictures.

Despite any photographic evidence to the contrary, the party was great and the kids loved the helium balloons. We only lost three to the sky: the ladybird, a unicorn and a pig’s head. But I think it’s nice for people to see them floating above if I don’t think of any potential environmental impact.

But because we’d only lost three, we had a lot of balloons in my flat afterwards. Including ten of the walking ones, just pottering around my home. My son then ripped off the feet of them all, so they floated up to the ceiling to await their deflating fate.

The first one to start going down was the horse. It didn’t plunge to the floor though. There was still enough helium to keep it hanging around at face height. Which was a bit weird. And I also started to feel sorry for it as it was always floating head downwards.

I’ve got a bit of a fear about being stuck at the top of a theme park ride upside down. Which is an irrational fear as I don’t go on theme park rides. So I kept thinking about the blood rushing to his little equine head and tried to turn him the right way up whenever I saw him. Which is insane. And didn’t work. He just bobbed upside down again. I then began holding him upright for a short while to give him a bit of a break. As you can imagine, this soon grew tiresome and I stopped.

Then something happened when I was having dinner one evening. Imagine a real horse trying to get your attention. What would it do? Yes, nudge you with its nose. No word of a lie, the helium horse started doing this to me. It had bobbed towards me mid-air and was nudging my shoulder.

I knew what he wanted. To be upright. So found myself eating my dinner with one hand while using the other to hold the helium horse like a baby.

When I’d finished, I let it go and tried to forget it had ever happened. I thought no more of it. Until it was time to go to bed.

When I went into my bedroom, I saw that the helium horse had made its way there. It had bobbed itself down the hallway from the living room and was hovering about just above my bed. I was horrified. As maybe it just wanted to be cuddled at night. But what if, and this is much worse, what if it had fallen in love with me and wanted some adult fun times? I’m not doing it with a helium balloon. Especially not a horse one. Pig maybe.

So I did the only thing I could. I got a gun and shot it. Not really. I just gently carried it back to the living room and said, “Not tonight darling.” It didn’t try again.