What do you do if you lose your place in your speech, and you search in vain for a seeming eternity through your notes only to give up and wing it?  If you’re the U.K.’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, you launch into an encomium for Peppa Pig World. It wasn’t a successful choice.

For those who live outside the U.K., perhaps, Peppa Pig and its world may be “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill, an earlier and clearly more eloquent Prime Minister described the Russia of his day.  OK, so Peppa Pig is a popular TV series, running since 2004, about a town full of animal families, chief among them Peppa and her family.  Peppa Pig World is an amusement park dedicated to this charming animated porcine-themed story.

You can study Prime Minister Johnson’s misadventure in the speaking trade here.  The full blank before the Peppa Pig storm clocked in at 21 seconds, according to the BBC.  That’s about ten seconds less than the fabled Rick Perry Chasm of Blankness in a 2011 presidential primary debate where he struggled for just over 30 seconds desperately trying to remember the third agency of the federal government he was planning to eliminate if elected.

What can we learn from this very human moment in the Prime Minister’s remarkable remarks?  (And by ‘human’ I mean, of course, something the rest of us humans hope never to experience.)

First, even experienced pros, like the Prime Minister, can have blank moments.  Lack of sleep?  Wrong dosage? A brain freeze?  We will probably never know exactly where the Prime Minister’s mind went during those eternal 21 seconds.  But it is something that we all should expect will likely happen at some point in our speaking careers.

Can you prepare for such moments?  The best defense is to have a variety of speech segments on useful topics ready to go.  Anyone required to be expert about a subject over a long period of time will find themselves explaining similar things repeatedly.  The opportunity is to prepare those answers so that you can be consistent and steady in such moments, whether you’re on fire mentally, or fumbling for the neuronal light switch.

Second, never own the problem.  Instead, share it with the audience.  The Prime Minister, used to the spotlight, didn’t think to give it up or share it until the moment was already painful.  In that way, he owned the problem.  When he finally started talking about Peppa Pig, it was too late and too weird to save the moment.  He did in fact ask the audience a bit later if they’d been to Peppa Pig World, which was the right instinct, if the wrong question – but in any case it came too late.  The rhetorical damage was already done.  The instant he realized he had lost his way, he should have said, “Let me pause here and take questions,” so as to hand the conversational baton over to the audience.  It might have required more verbal ju-jitsu to make that appear to be smooth and intentional, but even a slightly awkward hand-off would have been better than the Awful 21 Seconds and the Subsequent Derailment of the Speech Train just outside of Peppa Pig World.

Third, you will ultimately own whatever goes wrong.  Don’t try to blame the staff, or the lighting, or claim that the audience liked it fine, as the Prime Minister did.  No one will believe you.  The mystery is worse in the public eye than the confession.  Far better to shrug it off and say, “I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately and my fatigue was showing.”  You’re going to be seen as ‘human’ anyway, so you might as well own your humanity.