Un chat dans ma gorge

I studied French for like, 100 years or so. I started it in high school, kept it up after I'd left by watching the Open Learning shows on the ABC and going over old text and exercise books, then when I went to uni I did another three years of it, as well as some official qualification certified by the French Government, no less. Add to this, two trips overseas involving some eurotravel, and I guess you could say I've picked up a fair bit over the years. Sometimes, just out of habit, I'll be walking along muttering to myself about music, politics or chinese food and I'll try to express my ideas in my head in French, elaborately constructing sentences in the future perfect tense or, when I really want to impress myself, using the subjunctive mood. I smile, smugly at times, at how good my recall of irregular verbs is and at how well I can express various ideas using regular French idiom rather than literal translations from English. But the fact is that I am out of practice. Case in point: I ran into my lecturer from uni today. She's really French and as such likes to converse with all her students and former students in French (why wouldn't she). And despite my assurances to myself that I'm really good at speaking it, it's at times like this I find that my capability of expression really leaves a lot to be desired. She asks me a simple question, like "How's your family?" (en francais, bien sur) and I'm using the third person plural as the subject but conjugating verbs in the first person singular; I'm using avoir instead of etre as an auxiliary verb for those sixteen verbs which every French student learns to conjugate with the latter; and I'm using the infinitive of a verb instead of the past participle. I don't know why, I just get nervous I guess. She just asks me the next question before I've had time to think about how I'm going to answer the one she just fired off. I think I'd be fine having a French conversation by email. Actually doing it face to face... there's just too much pressure.