A new beginning after 60 years: "I lost the ability to speak - and I became a filmmaker"

It was during a lunch with a colleague that Jonathan Hirons started to feel a little weird. "I couldn't figure out what was going on," he says, "and my words started to slip out." Back in the office where he was having meetings, another colleague showed him a document Hirons had been working on and asked him to edit something on it. "And I couldn't."

He doesn't remember much about the rest of that day in London in January 2019. "I was just confused; I didn't know what was going on," he said. An ambulance was called and he was taken to University College Hospital, where doctors suspected he had a stroke. A CT scan this afternoon and an MRI the next day confirmed that "a blood vessel had burst in his brain. 'The bleeding was quite short, which was lucky,' says Hirons. He no longer had any physical problems, but he suffered from aphasia - a loss of language .

The experience inspired the 72-year-old to make a documentary about the condition, sparking a new direction as a filmmaker after years of working in business and project management. On the Tip of My Tongue is nearing completion, with a rough cut about to be produced, and Hirons has found the process. surprisingly satisfying. “Even the boring parts are enjoyable. So now I'm thinking, what can I do next?"

Hirons language is back, with some help. When we talk on Zoom, he doesn't has no noticeable speech problems, except when he sometimes forgets a word, smiles and says he'll remember it tomorrow. In the hospital, however, he couldn't speak at all beyond answering simply 'yes' or 'no' to the doctors and his wife, who had come from their home near Lyme Regis in Dorset.His speech began to recover within days - but then he could read his head , he found he couldn't read aloud, words getting confused as he tried to say them. Numbers were, and still are, a problem. "I couldn't use my phone," says -he.

Was that scary? He thought about the question as if it had never occurred to him. Not scary, exactly, he said, but "I wondered: what is it going to happen?" He worried about the project he knew he couldn't finish, then realized he would probably never go back to work.

Back home after five days of hospitalization, while waiting for an appointment with a speech therapist, he begins to practice reading and speaking with help of children's flash cards that his wife bought. “She got me started,” he says. Once formal therapy began, with exercises to recognize and read words, her language improved. It wasn't like learning to read again; it was rather that it was starting to come back little by little. "Some things I was like, 'Oh yeah, I remember that.'"

After about five months, he was able to have a decent conversation, although it took about a year to be really sorted”. Now he says: "I'm fine one-on-one, but in a crowd I still can't keep up like I used to. I have to think about what's being said, or what I have to say, and sometimes it doesn't come out. Some days his speech fails. "When I'm tired it's the worst time and I get confused or forget words." Other days it's not a problem. "So it's not even consistent."

He can write quite easily again, but reading aloud is still difficult, as is giving a lecture or a presentation - something he loved before." It's weird because in my head I know what's going on; it's when it comes out that it goes bad.

He knows, however, that his aphasia could have been much worse. For his film, he interviewed two young people – one had a stroke, the other a traumatic brain injury – who need much more support and struggle with the language that he. support from Exeter where he started dating, he met people who could not speak and people who were isolated by their condition. "I'm lucky that my wife is very supportive of me, as are the people around me, but some people go to this group, which happens once a week, and the rest of the time they're on their own." Unsurprisingly, he knows people who have suffered from depression due to aphasia.

The idea for the film came from the band. The woman who organized it, he says, “told me how difficult it is to get people to understand what the problem is, and so there is no help. I thought: this is ridiculous – there are about 350,000...