SINCE my last column, I've enjoyed the dubious pleasure of being rushed to hospital for something clearly not serious enough to have prevented my writing another one.

Journalists are prevailed upon to avoid the word "rushed" when talking about an ambulance's comings and goings but I always think it adds urgency, apart from necessarily encouraging a reporter's enthusiasm.

As it happens, my early-morning journey to the Royal Gwent at Newport seemed to be leisurely, as far as I could make out from the rate at which vaguely-identifiable landmarks scudded past the window. Did the green-clad team looking after me already know something I didn't?

It all began when I awoke at 7am feeling faintly out of breath. I went back to sleep in the semi-conscious state that convinces you that you have been dreaming.

But ten minutes later I was awake again, this time with a definite tightness of the chest. Not a pain, I convinced myself, but something obviously related to my breathing difficulties.

I went into the kitchen and pretended nothing was wrong, knowing full well that something was. My wife phoned 999.

Funnily enough, all I could think of while waiting for the paramedics was the First Aid course I'd promised to take in retirement. Fully trained, I could have done a spot of self-diagnosis and hopefully ruled out the worst.

It did occur to me that my condition might be related to the respiratory virus I'd been harbouring for three months. I'd completed a second course of anti-biotics the day before I went swimming in the sea while holidaying in Cyprus.

Looking upwards at eternity engraved on the ambulance ceiling and with an oxygen mask in place, I had not travelled a mile before the paramedic inside the vehicle said the heart monitor to which she'd attached me was reading normal. My pulse was also satisfactory.

I was feeling fraudulent by the time an orderly was pushing me on a stretcher past the queue in the A&E corridor - even in an emergency there are priorities.

I was wheeled into a room, monitored regularly for two hours, X-rayed and blood-tested before the doctor confirmed the virus connection and prescribed a third dose of antibiotics.

Clutching the tablets and still in my pyjamas and dressing-gown, I languished in the waiting-room among fully-clad members of the public like a character in an Alan Bennett play, and thought only of my mother's injunction to always make sure I was wearing clean underpants in case I was ever knocked over in the road.

What had it all been about?

The heart's a funny thing. It skips a beat or two, begins racing, or refuses to slow down after you've completed some strenuous physical exercise in the evening, and you start worrying.

Being a mild hypochondriac in the interests of health and fitness, I'd long discovered that the average human ticker was good for about 200 years so long as it wasn't abused by such things as cigarette smoke and coal dust or put under strain by videos of Britney Spears.

I can feel mine now as I sit staring at the computer screen. It beats slowly and strongly as though it were connected to my ears, and I'm inclined to interpret this as a good sign.

Perhaps it is content because I am at ease, thoroughly overwhelmed by the kindness and efficiency of the NHS and in restful awe of the way it copes day in, day out, even when put under pressure by timewasters and drunken louts on a Friday night.

I don't know about rushing to hospital, but I'd certainly rush to judgement of the people who sorted my spot of palpitating bother on the day the alarm bells rang with more urgency than good reason.