Back in the day, the SDLP leader John Hume had a habit of dropping in to my office at the Derry Journal. I was the editor there at the time.

He would come in, light up a cigarette, take about two puffs and then stub it out as he got into the full swing of telling a story. Talk about wasting money on fags.

Anyway, as the years rolled on I noted that with increasing frequency when he lit a cigarette, he sometimes went into his own wee world, even sitting for five or 10 minutes without speaking.

This was a totally new development, and as I am definitely not good with silence it used to unnerve me more than a little. Do you try to re-start a conversation? Do you just ignore him and start subbing copy? Do you answer the phone and pretend he’s not there?

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No matter how often it happened I never knew what to do.

Hume was aware of this trait and mentioned that he was concerned about it. He explained that he couldn’t concentrate like he used to, that he sometimes couldn’t remember the names of people he knew well, and revealed he had mentioned this to a couple of doctors.

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