Breathing Lessons and What Are You Watching At The Moment?

Mar 14, 2025

pink breathe neon sign — Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash

I am now an expert on oxygen.

“Have you watched Amandaland?” my sister asked me. We were in the middle of one of our WhatsApp conversations discussing care of the elderly. I was updating her on our dad’s latest visit to the respiratory clinic. “It takes me out of my world completely,” she said. “I’m on the camping episode at the moment”.

On a Sunday evening, the night before his appointment, when hospitals were all I could think about, I’d left my family bickering at the dinner table, not the infirm ones who live elsewhere but the not-infirm ones I share a house and a bathroom with, and I’d gone outside and had a lie down on a bench in the garden even though it was March. I’d looked up at the stars and taken a breath and considered how squeezed my lungs felt because alongside my own aging, my jowls and my varifocals and my middle-aged acne, I had teenagers and octogenarians to deal with and sometimes it felt like I was living upside down, caring for the people who used to care for me.

When I went back inside and the table was wiped and the dishes were all in the dishwasher and the children had retreated to their bedrooms and the plans were in place for another Monday morning and my dad had checked again whether I was still picking him up at 9.30am, my husband said, “Do you want to watch something?” and I couldn’t think of anything that would take me out of my world enough because I’d already done Amandaland.

And I thought about how the conversation goes when I meet up with friends now, how once we’ve covered the offspring and the local scandal and where we’ve eaten recently and the ailments of the parents and their refusal to get hearing aids, we’ll get to “What are you watching at the moment?” And we’ll compare notes because in many ways, television, being taken out of our world for a bit, is all that’s helping us to breathe. The Day of the Jackal had been suggested by a few, but I had to tell them that my husband had watched it without me. “I didn’t think you’d like it,” he’d said. “How could he,” said someone who was outraged by this act of betrayal but then I hadn’t invited him to join me for the new Agatha Christie because he’s not that into murder mysteries set in the 1930s in Devon. But he’d said I could watch Towards Zero on the big screen while he watched the football on a little one. And our marriage seems to work on those kind of compromises.

But we’d given up on Severance because a science-fiction-psychological-thriller wasn’t giving me any relief and whilst the set design was exemplary, and it was a really clever idea, the carpet which represented the severed world was just too green, and I wasn’t that invested in microchips which could separate the workplace self from the outside self especially in an era when most people were working from home. And we’d finished Landman which was kind of Dallas with conscience and Billy Bob Thornton in a cowboy hat killing the notion that alternative energy is clean because the thing is, wind turbines depend on the oil industry. “And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery,” he said.

We were currently splitting our viewing between Industry and Zero Day and White Lotus but everyone in Industry was a narcissistic psychopath, and they were numbing themselves with sex and drugs and yachts and trying to win at high finance and each time I watched it, I felt like I needed a bath afterwards, a disinfecting from the hyper-masculinity of the trading floors. “I’m a man and I’m relentless,” said Eric. “Say it with me,” he tells Robert, who is a recent graduate and deserves a better mentor. But Robert does it. He tentatively repeats it, gradually getting louder and louder until both men are screaming it together.

“It’s an astonishing amount of fun,” said the Guardian about Zero Day but it wasn’t because Robert De Niro seemed far too old to be out running with his dog and tracking down cyber terrorists and even though he’s a former US president, we get the sense that his wife would have made a better one. And in White Lotus, everyone is staying in a luxury resort and having massages and doing yoga, but no one is happy, and it’s a bit like Industry only sunnier.

“Can we watch an episode of Somebody Somewhere?” I said because each one was only twenty-five minutes long and it was a subtle and gentle series, all about the human need to belong, and it never hit you over the head with the point it was trying to make even though all life was happening in it. And I couldn’t explain why but there was something deeply spiritual about it. There was grief and sibling rivalry and partners that cheat and getting your steps in and angst and church and alcoholism and health scares and manifesting and childhood conditioning and trying to start a new business and taking on the family farm because your father can’t manage it anymore and has gone to live in Texas and a lot of eating donuts and drinking tini-tinis1together when life gets a little too much.

“The spine of the show is simply an adult friendship that develops between a cynical, sad heterosexual woman unsatisfied with life, and a gangly, giggly, wholesome, gay, religious man who is trying to inhabit the life he desires. But in that simplicity is where the big, complex things lie,” said the Guardian2.

And in the episode we watched, Joel was attending a men’s Bible book club and they were discussing “grace and aging” and Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God. And Joel wasn’t that keen on the topic, but he was even more worried about being in a space with just men. “Any place without women does sound terrifying,” he tells Sam.

My dad hands me his folder of notes as soon as I collect him, before we get to the car, before we exit the driveway. I carry it round the stages of his appointment along with his coat. I look after it during the height and weight, the blood pressure, the breathing test. I know the names of his medication. The nurse in the clinic knows my name. I catch her eye, and she catches my drift, and she mentions handrails and occupational therapists. “It’s another step,” she says as she shows us the canisters. There are carrying options – a one-shoulder, a backpack, a cross body. It would be useful to be oxygenated when using the stairs, she says, but not when barbecuing or blowing out candles. She has to go through the safety fact sheet, warn about Vaseline and emollients. “You’d be surprised how many men use retinol,” she says. The Fire Brigade need to be alerted, the insurance company too.

I never expected to become an expert on oxygen.

“I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things - piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car, you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being,” says Anne Tyler3.

And no one gives you lessons on how to continue to breathe lightly when you feel like you’re living upside down.

Of course, there were parts of Amandaland which were farcical, and in many ways, Amanda was just a more glamorous version of Hyacinth Bucket but the whole thing was loaded with pathos. Amanda was navigating life, recovering from a divorce and coping with moving her children from Chiswick to South Harlesden. She was trying to launch a career as an influencer. She was determined not to be a nobody and an exemplar of refusing to be held back by your own self-limiting beliefs. She’d found a job in a kitchen showroom. “Plan is co-lab this year, then go PLC, then aim to float myself by 2030,” she said. She was dealing with a mother who had once been a model and was in denial about the aging process. There was a poignancy to all Felicity’s peers dying off, how she referred to her live-in carer as her PA.

My dad said even though he got out of breath, he wouldn’t be using the oxygen to take the newspaper round to his next-door neighbour. Someone might be looking out their window, he said. “I’ll think about somewhere you can practice with it,” I said, maybe a path or a park, one with a bench, a carpark nearby.

“God speaks to us through the stuff of our lives and through the stuff of other people’s lives too,” says Renita J. Weems4. “We expect God to appear in those places where holy men usually conduct their affairs. If God speaks, it will be on mountains, in caves, in sanctuaries, in temples…. Anywhere but in a nursery, in a playground, in a kitchen, in a parking lot, at the checkout counter, or at the bedside of a decaying old woman”.

“We are bereft,” she said, “because we lack traditions that elevate caring for children, the aged, and the infirmed to meaningful ventures for encountering spiritual wisdom”.

I stand in my dad’s kitchen, and I put a backpack with a canister of oxygen on my shoulders and I feel the weight. And I listen for God.

Days Like This with Deborah Sloan

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