L'appel du vide: Electricians and Paratroopers

High Places Phenomenon (HPP), or more commonly, "l'appel du vide," (the call of the void) is the sudden, inexplicable urge to jump from a high place, even when you have no intention of harming yourself.

I've never heard that call: never felt that urge. But my wife has. She isn't scared of heights. She'll happily climb to the top of an enclosed rooftop terrace. 

But without that balustrade, she'd surely have felt the urge to sprint towards the edge and hurl herself off. She does not however, unless you're inclined towards Freudian psychology, have a secret death wish. It is more commonly understood that l'appel du vide is a cognitive glitch; a misreading of the self-preserving signal to back away from the edge. A bit like misreading the red stop light as a signal to go. Perhaps, not unsurprisingly, it's experienced as an unpleasant feeling of uncanniness. A feeling better avoided than overcome. 

From Heights to Hazards: Expanding the Concept

Callum Robinson, in ‘A Brief Note On: Health and Safety’ in his excellent book Ingrained, feels the urge from the top of a tree: the urge to. He gets it. That uncanny urge. But Robinson, a furniture maker and a wood worker, takes it a step further, imagining himself impulsively sprinting towards a bandsaw and then leaping to meet the blade head first.

He once made the mistake of assuming it was a universal feeling asking a colleague if they'd ever considered running into a cutting machine. Robinson conveys the awkward silence that follows so well that the reader feels the uncanniness of it all.

Andrew Klavan tells the story of a Romantic poet's fascination with electricity. At the the beginning of the nineteenth century, long before the invention of the Regs Book, the poet Percy Shelley would while away his college days at Oxford by collecting pieces of electrical equipment. He was fascinated by the subject. His friend T.J. Hogg would help him attach wires to his hands and body, and then shock him until 'his long, wild locks bristled and stood on end'.

Like Shelley, I wanted to know what an electric shock felt like. I imagine most, if not all first year apprentice electricians, wonder what it feels like. An old lecturer advised me that there were only two possible outcomes: you'll either still be alive, or you won't. A nice, straightforward binary outcome. After I found out, I stopped wondering. I've never felt the urge to put my hands on three-phase busbars out of curiosity. It's not fear; it's just respect for the amoral phenomenon of electricity.  Perhaps it was this amorality that appealed to Shelley.

Robinson's piece prompted some questions about accidents in the workplace. Was it possible, I wondered, whether those individuals who hear l'appel du vide were more likely to have accidents because they inadvertently listened too closely to the call? Think of that French verb, S'appeler, to name oneself. Are accidents an identification with the void, as if the void knows your name?

Etymologically inaccurate as that reading is, it's possibly also the wrong way around. What if sufferers of l'appel du vide aren't more prone to throwing themselves from high places but less likely to do so precisely because they're experiencing an urge without an attendant desire? Someone who experiences l'appel du vide is actually receiving a very strong safety alert from their brain. They are keenly aware of the danger. The feeling is unsettling, but it serves as a powerful reminder of the "void" and the need for caution.

What if it's people like me, people who don't get it, who are oblivious to the danger who are more likely to injure themselves? Someone who doesn't experience the call might lack this specific, visceral safety alert and therefore might not have the same immediate, physical sense of danger that the "call" provides. This could make me more susceptible to accidents because I might not fully register the presence of the void and the risks associated with it. The silence leading to a false sense of security.

But it's not just Robinson fils. Robinson père too. He even has a name for it: "Machine Tool Vertigo". And with just that word it's impossible not to have Bernard Hermann’s chords sound in your head. And although l'appel du vide isn't acrophobia it's equally impossible not to picture James Stewart on the very edge of the mission's bell tower.

P Company

"P Company," is a gruelling 5-day selection course for the British Army's Parachute Regiment. It's a physically and mentally demanding test designed to identify individuals with the required grit and resilience to become airborne warriors. Passing 'P Company' earns you the right to wear the red beret. As a case study, it helps illuminate some possible answers to those questions.

The Trainasium, a core component of P Company selection, is an elevated assault course set at 30 to 60 feet above the ground. The most challenging part, the "shuffle bars", involves walking across two parallel scaffolding poles. This scenario is a deliberate test of a soldier's ability to function under the physiological and psychological stress that this height and lack of a protective barrier creates.

The shuffle bars are actually not that high off the upper platform. But because the whole trainasium structure takes you above the treetops, standing on the bars is designed to make it feel a great deal higher than it is. It's a clever psychological trick: make the candidate feel fear without putting them in any real danger. 

One other feature of the shuffle bars which makes them scarier than they actually are, is the absence of any barriers. One could, you're made to feel, fall a great distance. But P Company isn't designed to identify people who aren't scared. Instead its designed to identify those recruits who can still perform effectively under fear's influence. Not to not hear the call of the void, but to hear it, and still do your duty.

Physical and Metaphysical Barriers: The Urge Without a Desire

When my wife and I climbed out onto the roof terrace of The Music Room, the balustrade acted as a physical barrier. To answer the call she'd have to do something more than just run and jump . She would have to climb over the barrier and that's not what l'appel du vide prompts. 

But more significantly, she didn't hear l'appel du vide. That was odd to learn. At a tautologically obvious level, physical barriers act as physical barriers but they also act as a sound barrier blocking off, or silencing, the call of the void. And so, on another level, since there is no objective call to hear, they also act as a psychological barrier. There was no immediate sense of danger and therefore no signal to misread.

Conclusion

Barriers in a distribution board are crucial for safety. They are designed to enclose or shield live parts, providing a physical barrier that primarily prevents accidental contact with live electrical parts. These barriers typically offer at least IPXXB or IP2X protection, meaning they prevent access by small objects like fingers.

But, remember, next time you fit one: it's not just a physical barrier; you're silencing l'appel du vide.

Sources & Credits

Robinson, C. (2024) Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, London, Penguin

The Institute of Engineering and Technology, (2022) BS 7671 2018 + A2, Requirements for Electrical Installations, Eighteenth Edition, London, IET

Klavan, A. (2022) The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poet's Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus, Michigan, Zondervan Books, (quoted from pp.72-73)

Image Credits

Bruce Robinson in The Pirn Inn as part of Balfron Book Festival, 6th September 2025. Photo taken by Donna Nicholson-Arnott

A Rooftop Terrace With A View, (2nd August 2025) taken at the Landmark Trust's Music Room in Lancaster. Photo taken by Donna Nicholson-Arnott

Trainasium, The Parachute Regiment Training Company, (17 April 2019), X, https://x.com/Para_Training/status/1118585166467932161, (retrieved 19th September 2025)

File:Shelley Memorial, University College, Oxford (5178754841).jpg, Wikimedia Commons, https://share.google/cOQU4iUTDhwstb3aJ, CC 2.0, (retrieved 19th September 2025)

​"Is It a Sort of DIY Book?": Confronting Myself As "The Other"

I recently telephoned a Glasgow branch of Waterstones to have a copy of Callum Robinson's book Ingrained : The Making of A Craftsman set aside. The bookseller put me on hold whilst he checked that they had a copy and then, on his return, asked in a slightly uncertain tone; "is it a sort of DIY book?"

At that moment, that split-second of potential before answering I thought of pontificating in a faux Glasgow University accent, “Well, actually, it's a profound meditation on man's relationship with the world through the making of objects”. But I didn't. I just resigned myself and said “Aye, that's what it is”.

When I relate this story I play it for laughs. That at least is what I did at the recent Balfron Book Festival, when I told it to Callum Robinson. After all, it is funny. Or rather, it's, “quite” funny. Or, more accurately, I play it for laughs because it's not funny. Because as I hung up, happy that the book was waiting for me, I was genuinely disconcerted. Why did the exchange feel so unsatisfactory, so ... odd?

In this post, I want to try to work towards understanding that feeling. Because the bookseller’s question isn't one that would be asked of a master chef's memoirs. I can't imagine the same bookseller inquiring about Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: "is it a sort of cook book”? And that begs the obvious question, what was it about Ingrained that prompted the question?

There are a number of ways to go about this. We could consider the relationship between craft or making and the activity of DIY; we could consider the fact that the exchange took place during a phone call rather than face-to-face. ​It's highly likely that the phone call enabled the bookseller's question. A phone call is a more transactional and less personal form of communication than a face-to-face interaction. The absence of visual cues and social context allows for a more direct, sometimes blunt, way of inquiring. And if I had been present in the store, he might simply have held the book up and asked “is this the right one?”

But what I want to do is consider the first part of the bookseller's question: the “a sort of” part which functions in the question as a discourse marker; a word or phrase that helps to structure and organize what someone is saying. Discourse markers often signal a speaker's attitude or their relationship to the topic, rather than contributing to the literal meaning of the sentence.

The most obvious signal that “a sort of” sends is one of uncertainty; but it serves a few other functions as well, such as hedging, approximation and signalling the unfamiliar. Let's take each of these in turn. 

By saying "is it a sort of DIY book?" the bookseller softens their meaning by creating a polite distance from their own question. He's not making a definitive classification, which avoids the risk of being completely wrong or directly offending me. This is a common way people navigate social interactions when they lack full knowledge.

And “a sort of DIY book” doesn't mean “a DIY book”. The discourse marker here suggests that "DIY book" is the closest category he can think of, but perhaps isn't a perfect fit. It's a way of saying "I don't know the exact term, but taking an educated guess I'm guessing it falls into this general category”. 

On one hand then, the hedging and the taxonomical approximation highlight the bookseller's unfamiliarity with the subject matter. All that is to his credit and he's certainly earned marks for effort.

On the other hand however, the discourse marker highlights the implicit assumption that a book on woodworking must be a practical, instructional manual rather than a personal memoir or a philosophical exploration of man's tool-use in order to make objects and meaning.

This assumption left me wondering why it was hard to believe that a book about a manual craft could be more than just instructions. There is, in “is it a sort of”, an incredulity, an incredulity that someone could write about woodworking, and perhaps an even greater incredulity that that someone would want to read it. Who on earth would want to read “a sort of DIY” book without wanting to know how to make things? And with those ideas, I think we start to get a little closer to what was so disconcerting about the whole exchange.  

​Navigating the Cultural Divide

The bookseller’s question signals unfamiliarity: not just an understandable and excusable unfamiliarity with that particular book, but an unfamiliarity with the very idea of that particular book. The bookseller's language reveals more about his knowledge or worldview—by revealing a broader societal bias against working with your hands. It's subtle, unspoken — and it's more effective than a more direct statement ever could.

The bookseller's language, specifically the use of "a sort of," acts as a linguistic barrier. It's a way of saying, "This doesn't fit into my worldview, and because it's unfamiliar, I have to categorize it in the closest, most pragmatic way I know how”.

But the bookseller's question didn't just signal his unfamiliarity; it transferred it onto me. He was confronted with something outside his realm of reference—a book on woodworking that wasn't a DIY manual. But rather than admit his own lack of knowledge, his question reframed the situation so that the unfamiliarity became mine.

Though he didn't say it, the question signaled a subtle transfer of unfamiliarity. It was as if his lack of understanding of the book was recast as a statement about me and my reading choices, suggesting I was a different 'sort of' Waterstones reader/customer than he was used to.

​It’s a subtle but powerful act of othering. His verbal uncertainty, represented by "a sort of," became a label of uncertainty applied to me. The burden of explaining my reading choice was placed onto me, not on him to understand the book. This is precisely why the interaction felt so disconcerting, despite the lack of any overt malice.

For the bookseller, a book about a manual craft could only be an instructional guide—a DIY book. This I think demonstrates, not just “a” cultural bias where the hands-on, tangible world is seen as separate from the intellectual, narrative world of memoirs and literature, but "the” actual cultural bias that exists in present day Scotland; one enhanced and intensified by the massive rise in school pupils going to university. And though recognition of this situation/problem is gaining traction there remains a number of questions that need to be asked and answered. 

What happens to a society when hands-on trades are not given the same academic or cultural respect as other fields? 

What happens to people, mostly white working-class men, when their society tells them that working with your hands is something you do if you fail at school? 

What is the impact on the mental health of people, hand-workers, who are made to think that their work is of lesser value than “the life of the mind”?

Of course, no lanyarded member of the educational elite is openly going to disparage the trade's or manual work. They don't have to. The whole educational system is geared towards the only real measure of success being entry to university. 

By asking "is it a sort of DIY book?", the bookseller was not just classifying a product; they were inadvertently revealing a deeper cultural assumption. They were signaling that the world of craft is "other" to the world of literature. And when my interest in a book by a woodworker made me a part of that "other" world, it felt like a moment of being seen as an outsider—someone whose reading habits didn't align with the expected norm for someone seeking a book in a place like Waterstones.

Confronting Myself As “The Other”

When I was in Primary 4, I won a book token. I went with my dad to Grant's bookshop on Union Street. I came away with The World of History, and I still have it. I've been buying books ever since. They are part of my identity. A way that I define myself. And, if I'm honest, others. If I see someone reading a book, I'll try to see what they're reading. Young or old; black or white; male or female, I've found readers to always be interested in what other readers are reading. My discomfort was then in part that I was mistaken.

The reason that I found the interaction with the bookseller so disconcerting was a sudden worry that I didn't belong. Waterstones might make money by selling Ingrained, but it might not value Ingrained. And by extension, not value readers of Ingrained, readers like me.

Conclusion

I wouldn't like you to think that I was offended. I wasn't. And there's every possibility that my call was answered by a novice bookseller who tried their best to explain the unfamiliar thing that they held in their hand.

And I accept those possibilities. Even so, and coming back to the point made at the start of this post, it's hard to imagine another type of book that might provoke that “is it a sort of” question. So it seems legitimate to ask what these subtle interactions reveal about how society values certain types of work and knowledge.

In this post, I've argued that the bookseller's discourse marker is symptomatic of the disdain with which hand-workers are held in certain sections of Scottish society. The bookseller doesn't, personally, have to share in that disdain. And that is to an extent, the point. The disdain is so embedded in the public consciousness that it can be manifested without really trying.

No Sire. It's An Educational Revolution

My letter in The Herald on Sunday (07 September).

Dear Madam,

I like a good laugh. But nothing quite prepared me for the coffee-spluttering, full belly chortle prompted by James McEnaney's plea that political parties should be kept out of education.

The Scottish education system is failing. I would say that it was failing right, left and centre but it would be more accurate to say that it's the left and centre that are failing it. “It”, that's such an anonymous way to put it. Failing the pupils, their parents, the teachers, the support-workers, the employers, the people of this country.

Our universities are dependent on foreign fee-paying students with their concomitant effect on urban land use, housing and social coherence. Our schools lack discipline, our teachers lack the respect they should deserve, and far too many of the pupils lack the motivation to even bother turning up. And our colleges struggle on numerous levels, in part, because of the relentless drive to get as many pupils as possible into "free" university places. The list could go on and on and on. There is failure at every level and in every sector. And every single one of these failures can be traced back to, at best, liberal educational policies, and at worst, progressive ones.

As Mr. McEnaney knows full well, arguing that political parties should be kept out of education is itself a deeply political act. It pretends neutrality where there is bias. In fakes disinterest to the advantage of interested activists. It seeks to maintain power for an elitist left-of-centre agenda to the exclusion of the concerns of ordinary people. And it demonstrates the extent of the cosy left-wing consensus in Holyrood which ranges from the Scottish Conservatives to the Greens, the mostly left to the loony left.

It's this leftist consensus, that for all his criticisms, Mr. McEnaney wishes to preserve. Unfortunately for him though, his missive communicates more than it intends. It communicates fear. Fear that for the first time in the devolution period, there is an opportunity to make the Scottish education great again. Fear that the education system will put the priorities of ordinary people first. Fear that the ordinary people who’ve had a belly full of the mendacity, the incompetence, the anybody-but-them-attitude that takes their taxes, treats them as scum and when the find their voice derogates them as white supremacists, the far-right, or whatever the clichéd slur du jour happens to be have an entirely different set of educational priorities from the luxury beliefs of the Scottish educational establishment. 

So I was delighted to read Mr. McEnaney's article. It made my day. It indicates, perhaps even proves, that the progressive/liberal educational establishment with their over-inflated salaries, their mickey-mouse courses and their divisive diversity agendas are worried. They have every right to be. With success, this won't be the start of an educational revolt; it'll be the start of a revolution.

Yours Sincerely, 

Graeme Arnott.

Do Electricians Make Decisions? : The Electrician's Paradoxical Freedom

Introduction: The Puzzle of Vocational Autonomy

The question seems ridiculous. Ridiculous to the point of absurdity. So absurd that it doesn't really deserve a response. And yet.

As I read through the characteristics of each level in the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework, that's precisely the question that came to mind..

Let me explain. Firstly, the background.

For the last dozen or so weeks, much of my time has been spent taking part in the Cambridge Assessment Network's course on the Fundamental Principles of Assessment. As part of our week studying the assessment principle of ‘comparability’, I compared the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) and the Scottish Credit & Qualifications Framework (SCQF).

The EQF has eight levels (Level 1 up to Level 8) in which each level sets out the associated learning outcomes of skill, knowledge, and responsibility and autonomy. Level 2 doesn't have a great deal of skills and knowledge but it does allow the learner a small degree of autonomy.

The SCQF is Scotland's national framework for comparing different qualifications. It compares a different element from the EQF (qualifications v. learning outcomes) but it's still possible to put the two frameworks side-by-side and look at the similarities and the differences. 

The SCQF has twelve levels, rising “up” from 1 to 12. The Scottish Vocational Qualification (SVQ) Modern Apprenticeship for electricians, in Scotland, is a Level 7 qualification. Each level has five characteristics, one of which is titled 'Autonomy, accountability and working with others.' However, when you look at the description for levels 1-7, the word 'autonomy' doesn't explicitly appear. It only explicitly appears at Level 8.

Level 8 is the beginning of what might be termed “Higher Education”; the upper level of college qualifications, such as an HND. The level below a university undergraduate degree. 

And I found that odd. More than odd. I found it baffling. And it immediately raised a number of questions. And admittedly it also raised my hackles.

Some obvious questions 

+ Why is autonomy present in Level 2 of the EQF but not present until Level 8 of the SCQF? 

+ What happens at Level 8 that makes autonomy present in a way that it's not present in Levels 1 - 7?

+ Where does autonomy lie at Level 8 and “above”? Is it in the individual? The course materials? The interaction between the two? The way that the individual uses their learning in the workplace?

Or is it a case that people who “work with their head” are regarded as having autonomy, but people who “work with their hands”, don't? Is the SCQF yet another example of white-collar supremacy?

The Electrician's Paradox: Why True Freedom Is Found in the Rules

We wanna be free, to do what we wanna do, we wanna be free. And we want to get loaded.

When we think about being "autonomous," we can easily imagine it in terms of Primal Scream’s Loaded—total freedom; being able to do whatever we want; unconstrained by external rules or limits. But if that's the definition, (and it is a dictionary’s definition), how can we possibly talk about autonomy for someone in a highly regulated profession, like an electrician? After all, unfettered freedom on an electrical system would lead to chaos rather than competence.

This question highlights a major issue about how the SCQF thinks about skilled trades. The absence of "autonomy" until Level 8, suggests that the framework has an incomplete understanding of what autonomy means for apprentice and qualified electricians.

So, what is a more accurate way to understand autonomy in a skilled trade?

From Following Rules to True Agency

When an apprentice electrician learns a critical safety task like "Safe Isolation" (making sure an electrical system is dead before working on it), they start by simply following instructions such as Select's ‘10 Steps’. Their actions are driven by what they're told to do and maybe even by the fear of making a mistake. This, in the language of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is a state of "heteronomy"—acting from external instruction rather than internal reason. The journey of an apprenticeship is, or can be considered as the transition from heteronomous actions to autonomous ones. A qualified electrician performs the same task, but they act from a place of deep knowledge and reason. They understand the dangers, their responsibilities, and the necessary safety measures. At this point, in Kantian terms, they are an autonomous agent. But this is only part of the story.

Freedom Within Limits 

An electrician's work is governed by a huge number of standards and regulations, such as the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and BS 7671. At first, it might seem like these rules restrict their freedom, forcing us to slavishly follow the rules.

Paradoxically though, these standards are precisely what enable autonomy. BS 7671, for example, isn't just a list of prescriptions; it’s a historical framework of dynamic embedded knowledge, experience, and expertise of the historical electrical trade. It's a living tradition that has been refined and developed over time.

When an electrician works "within the frame," their actions are given meaning and value by these standards. Their job isn’t just to follow the rules; it's to use their sophisticated judgement and deep understanding to navigate this complex set of regulations, client specifications, and the constraints of the physical world. Working within the frame is one way that we produce "good workmanship".

Contrast this with a DIY enthusiast. They might do safe and functional work, but their actions lack the deeper ethical, interpretive engagement of a professional. They are unconfined by the limits of the frame, which means their work is just an outcome, not a meaningful act that validates the worth of the trade's tradition.

As the philosopher Roger Scruton put it, freedom is "a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere". The electrician's autonomy is the horse, and the industry’s standards are the "somewhere" it needs to ride to—the safe, responsible, and skilled work that is only possible because of those rules.

Why This Matters

By not explicitly acknowledging autonomy below Level 8, the SCQF misunderstands this "situated autonomy". It fails to recognize the "intellectual demands and professional development" required of a trade qualification. If frameworks like the SCQF are to effectively compare the worth of a trade qualification to a university degree, they must recognize that professional autonomy in skilled trades is not about being unconstrained. Instead, it is a sophisticated form of agency that gives meaning, dignity, and respect to a skilled worker's labor.

My Scrutonian Texts