“What are you thinking about?” My wife asks.
“I’m trying to remember what I was planning to write about. I knew I should have written it down. I’m sure it was something… good.”
“Where were you when you thought of it?”
“I think I was walking back from dropping the car in for a service… but this isn’t like trying to find something I’ve lost. I’m not looking for my keys.”
“But if you could remember where you were, then you might remember what you were thinking about.”
“You mean, like a sense memory? Do you think I should retrace my steps?”
“Could you retrace your steps?”
“Only if I could remember where I was when I thought of it, otherwise I’d have to retrace my steps for the whole week - and that would be no good.”
I pause to think for a while - the week involved walking between home and the garage twice, once walking home after dropping the car off and once walking there to collect it. I discounted either trip. Too long.
“What might I have been doing?” I wonder out loud.
"Only you can know,” she says - with a sort of ‘my work here is done’ attitude that I don’t find altogether helpful.
Much of my time, of course, is spent dealing with laundry. Collecting it, loading it, unloading it, hanging it out, getting it back in, and then dealing with what I call ‘the aftermath’. Again, I don’t feel I can entirely replicate the full laundry process of each of the preceding few days. Similarly I spend quite a lot of time washing up, some days I seem to spend hours washing up. ‘What a way to live’, I think to myself.
At this time of year, as the first raspberries make themselves known on the bushes in my garden (the main crop comes in the autumn) I also spend some time looking for berries to eat for breakfast. I replicate this - but find that all I’m thinking about is berries.
I cycle through the list of regular, daily, activities in my mind - and get no unusual results. No inspiration strikes. “I suppose,” I say, “I’m growing old and forgetful.”
I have recently had a birthday, it was not a ‘major’ one - just a common or garden annual reminder of mortality.
“You’re definitely growing older,” my wife says, “but you’ve always been forgetful.”
“Harsh,” I say.
I’m not sure I’ve always been forgetful, but then again, I think, how would I know. What if I’ve forgotten about being forgetful. I consider the evidence - I remember most things, I think, so that means I’m not altogether forgetful. There was a time when I forgot I was supposed to be in Luton, but then…
“I’m not sure that I’ve always been forgetful,” I say.
“Well you wouldn’t be, would you?”
A bigger problem is that I struggle to remember numbers - they don’t lodge well in my mind. Words are ok, numbers less so. If I have to remember a number then I have to construct a ‘memory palace’ - I tend to use a route that I walk quite often, and associate parts of it with particular things. Recently I had to remember “B3”, and used the memory palace technique to great effect. The problem is that I now need to let that memory go, so that I can use the same route to remember other things.
“What are you thinking about?” My wife asks.
“I forget,” I say.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.