Performing in ‘I am the King’, with members of Glastonbury-based Production Company, Shadow of the Tor.

There is something utterly baffling, and illogical, about anxiety’s triggers – a lack of consistency, even within what ought to be a closed circle of neurosis!

I am perfectly happy to get up on stage and act out a part – or, as happened twice during 2018, do stand-up comedy in a public place.

Comedy evening, with Shadow of the Tor.

Being filmed for television – which should, by rights, have had me prostrated with severe anxiety for weeks (both before and after the event) – was absolutely fine: Interesting and funny, rather than terrifying.

Yet a device that most people handle without thinking can mute me completely: The phone! I have both a landline and a mobile (the latter a sixtieth birthday present from my son, bless him). Texting is easy-peasy (I am a writer, after all) – but making phone calls, actually talking to others in this peculiar, disembodied way, can cause major panic attack symptoms.

Even weirder, I am better able to cope with phone calls to strangers than to those I know. With personal calls, I tend to let the other person do most of the talking – and am conscious of increased heart-beat, sweating and tummy pain when on the blower.

This has all come to a head, around Voicemail of all things. For reasons I cannot work out, I am unable to access phone messages left on my mobile. To make matters worse, the Voicemail symbol will then bleep (or possibly whinge!) and show itself every ten minutes – which means that I get a jolt of terror on a regular basis, my lizard brain insisting that such ghastly regularity must mean something dire has happened the other end. As the Monty Python team famously had it, in ‘Life of Brian’, ‘Always looks on the bright side of life!’ Ho ho!

Now, I am not stupid – and I know that I can find a way to ameliorate this phenomenon in the physical realm; the reason I am writing this, therefore, is to flag up something I suspect most of us experience: A discrepancy between the various elements of our emotional response in life, with a corresponding, ‘Why?’ bleated out in peevish tones.

I think, going back to the phone business, I prefer to talk to people when I can, as it were, see the whites of the buggers’ eyes, I guess because vocal cues can be theatrically ‘managed’  – and we depend, albeit unconsciously for the most part, upon visual as well as aural clues when talking to others.

Perhaps my relative ease with both film and stage performing stems from the Fourth Wall – and that gap between me and others is both reassuring and offers protection.

Bottom line with regard to the phone? It is a vital tool in our modern day communicative armoury (and I am not disputing its many life-saving uses) – but, in the social sense, it is geared towards life’s talkers…

…and I have always preferred writing!