Breathing and talking at the same time. That’s the problem.

I mean, not always. Mostly the breathing just happens in the background, automatically . Like a heartbeat. You don’t have to consciously keep your heart thumping away.

But with breathing, issues can arise, particularly in stressful situations. To be specific, for me, actually doing that breathing stuff can sometimes be problematic.

This is what it’s like; what it was like: the other day, I was conducting a funeral. I was well prepared, calm. No caffeine that morning, no alcohol the night before. A sound sleep. The script for the service was rehearsed, checked and polished. Over the past decade, I’ve done dozens, maybe hundreds of funerals. Over a lifetime, thousands of gigs, speeches, public meetings, radio and TV shows.

But suddenly I forgot how to do it. To breathe and talk. And a hall full of folk was listening and watching..

I am prone to occasional, fairly mild asthma, and I have to juggle a compendium of eight assorted pills every day to keep my arteries unclogged and my blood pressure within acceptable limits. Two heart attacks and four stents will leave you permanently medicated or dead. I know which option I prefer. But a recent medication tweak has wobbled the physical boat a bit. Timing for some of these pills is everything, at least for me. Beta blockers in the morning? Risk of written-off afternoons. On the other hand, they do take the edge off.

Anyway. This funeral. As soon as I began speaking I began to wonder if I’d ever breathe in again. Or if I breathed in, if I’d be able to stop. If I was going to faint and fall. Or just have to abandon the service, and plead that someone take over. Maybe I’d swell up like a balloon and float away.

I scanned the mourners for likely stand-in celebrants, trying to apply the threadbare mindfulness and self-hypnosis tricks I’d been taught a lifetime ago. All the while continuing with the service, reciting part of a sermon by John Donne on death and eternity, reading the eulogy. . And trying to visualise a childhood trip to the beach at Playa De Art on the Costa Brava. Where I was once calm, calm, calm.

Calm.

Did anyone notice that pause there? Come on, only five minutes and we’ll be singing a hymn. Breathe on me, breath of God. No, it’s not that one. It’s Abide With Me. Singing might help.

A few worrying heart palpitations, a surge of adrenalin, and bang, I’m suddenly OK. Just the graveside to get through, and I’ll manage that. Out on the high Lerwick peninsula called The Knab, the day’s bleak greyness dissolves into stormy sunshine. The huddle of mourners, the phalanx of pallbearers. Bressay Sound is too rough today for any small boats, but a big purser is bucketing out to the fishing grounds. The air is moving, blustering. I breathe easily. I catch my breath.

I wonder if my cardiac drugs are messing with the necessary flow of adrenalin for performing, because in the end that’s what public speaking is. I remember the weird falling-off-a-cliff sensation when I first stopped daily broadcasting: all those years of projection and dialling everything up to 12, and suddenly you’re free of the need to be noisy.

Calm, calm.

Afterwards, other occasions of breathless near-panic come back to me: feeling the same sensations during my very first live radio broadcast, a ‘write and read’ for Radio Shetland. And in the early days at Radio Scotland my ragged on-air wheezing had producers sending me to a voice coach. Someone whose method of teaching abdominal breathing which involved embarrassing tutorial clutching of my gut.

Since Sunday yet another winter cough has taken hold, and to try and thwart it I’ve been practising deep inhalation, exhalation, and using my red and blue inhalers more regularly. Also coffee, which helps. And no imminent funerals. No public engagements for a while, thank goodness. Out in the saltspraying, seaweedy wind, down to the rustle and clatter of our shingle beach, walking.

The trick, as Janice Galloway wrote, is to keep breathing. As for talking, well. That can wait. Practice makes slightly less imperfect.

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Subscriptions to my Substack are free. Thank-you to each and every one of the 740 people who are subscribed – it’s hugely appreciated. I’ll be sticking with this platform for the time being, but I’ve been wondering about moving the whole thing to a non-subscription blog like WordPress – let me know what you think in the comments. That would be free with a shop offering books, paintings and prints for sale. I think there’s a mail-out option as well. On the other hand, Substack makes the whole process of writing and publishing online particularly easy.

In the meantime, the plan is to publish bits of A Passing of Wind – the Shetland decapitations here at the weekend and another, more personal piece – possibly including poems, songs, pictures and other indulgences – during the week.