Forgetful

My poor memory is a constant embarrass-ment. Jenny remembers about four times as much as I do and is always reminding me of things I've completely forgotten.

Do you remember that woman we met in Sydney, who had serious sunburn and persistent hiccups, she asks me, and I have no recollection of her whatever.

Sometimes, when I don't remember a whole string of things, I'll pretend I remember some of them just to reduce the embarrassment.

It's sad that whole chunks of my life have vanished without trace. I can remember very little of my schooldays for example. I can remember the schools I went to and a lot of the teachers and pupils, but nothing much beyond that.

If someone asks me about the book I've just read, it's all I can do to recall the basic details of the plot and the main characters. Even while reading the book, any character who disappears for 50 pages and then resurfaces is an enigma. I struggle to remember who this person is and how she fits into the plot.

My poor memory does have a few advantages though. I forget bad experiences as if they never happened. So I don't nurse grudges and resentments.

Did I have a normal memory as a child? I don't remember.

Memory lapses

Along with my poor memory I have a tendency to remember the good things that have happened to me and forget the bad things. Which is a great advantage.

While some people remember the bad things very clearly and nurse extreme grudges for years on end, I seldom remember the bad things for long enough for a grudge to take root.

I'm sure there are many occasions on which people have insulted me or rejected me or belittled me or done me out of something, but they rapidly vanish from my memory and are mere water under the bridge.

I'll remember the enjoyable parts of a holiday, but the negative things - the disappointing hotel rooms or the flight delays or the dreadful weather - just fade away as if they never happened.

I only remember the bad things if they're especially bad and especially memorable, like the mattress in our San Francisco hotel that was the creakiest mattress we've ever encountered, or the food poisoning I had on a flight to Australia.

It means I can look back on my life and think it has generally gone well, because I forget all the things that would make me think otherwise.

The flaming row I had with my boss in 2015? What flaming row? I thought we got on rather well....

Brain drain

Oh dear. Some new research suggests that any amount of alcohol can damage the brain, even so-called moderate drinking. In which case teetotallers have had the right idea all along, and should be much brainier than us boozers.

Of course it's only one bit of research and has yet to be confirmed. So I'm not giving up alcohol any time soon. Jenny and I have roughly a glass of wine a day, which doesn't seem excessive. It's a pleasure we wouldn't want to lose.

But does this research ring true? Well, I've been drinking small amounts of alcohol for most of my life and I haven't noticed any drastic changes in my brain, except the slight forgetfulness that comes with advancing age anyway. 

If alcohol was damaging my brain, surely I'd be pretty gaga by now and having to be reminded who I am and what I'm doing.

And life-long teetotallers should be much smarter than I am and running rings round me. There are plenty of teetotallers in Northern Ireland (or so they say!) but some of them are quite visible dimwits, which sheds some doubt on the research.

Then again, I don't know what my brain would be like if I'd been a life-long teetotaller. Would I be so clever I'd be running rings round everyone else? Would I have polished off a cryptic crossword in ten minutes? Who knows?

And although we all lose millions of brain cells as we get older anyhow, apparently that still leaves us with more than enough brain cells to keep us functioning efficiently. So if alcohol kills a few more, does it really matter?

I await further research with interest. Cheers!

Mislaid memories

My memory works in peculiar ways. I can't remember a conversation I had last week, but I can remember helping the milkman with his deliveries in the 1950s. I can't remember the name of someone I've seen umpteen times but I can remember being paralytically hungover on a London bus in the late 1960s.

My theory is that rather like a computer, the human brain accumulates more and more memories until by my age it's totally overloaded and it adjusts by instantly forgetting what it regards as irrelevant trivia and only remembering what's strictly necessary for my everyday survival.

So I can remember what date my state pension is due or the name of the electrician, but other dates and names slide rapidly into some memory black hole and can only be retrieved with sophisticated salvage equipment. Or by asking the woman with curly hair yet again what her name is, prefaced by the usual embarrassing apologies and ingratiating smiles.

One useful quirk of my forgetful memory is that I seldom recall insults or criticism. They slip rapidly into the black hole. Some people remember even trifling insults for years, brooding on them and cursing the person who uttered them, but for me they're simply water off a duck's back. I see insults as mindless acts of malice, not to be taken seriously.

Some people are so sensitive that an especially macabre or gruesome image can make them physically sick. The image sticks in their mind and they wish they'd never seen it. Luckily I don't respond like that. I don't want to expunge the image of the collapsing Twin Towers, or the girl fleeing napalm in South Vietnam, or the priest trying to stop carnage on Bloody Sunday in Derry. I want to know about these things.

But I'd quite like to obliterate all the memories of my dreadful boarding school. Painful memories I could do without.

Out of reach

I'm hopeless at remem-bering the details of people's friends and relatives. However hard I try, names simply go in one ear and straight out the other. My memory is so feeble I'm just about capable of remem-bering a spouse, a partner or a sibling. Everything else vanishes down a cerebral black hole, never to be retrieved.

Even children's names just flutter by like moths. I'm gaily introduced to little James, Rebecca and Sophie (well, I tend to move in middle-class circles), only to forget their names ten seconds later. Did she say James or Jeff? Rebecca or Robin? Sophie or Sally? I'm searching my memory desperately, hoping I won't need their names in the next few minutes, and wondering how to bluff my way through till I'm reminded. Ah, so it was Sally? Why didn't that lodge in my brain? Doesn't she look just like a Sally?

Or someone casually mentions Robert, and how rapidly he's recovering from his operation. Robert? Who the hell is Robert? And what operation was this? Is Robert anything to do with Teresa, the tall, red-haired woman? Is he the same Robert who's allergic to cats? How do I stealthily find out? Or hide my ignorance?

I can recall the closest names, but all the far-flung connections usually escape me. The in-laws, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces. It's too much to absorb. I marvel at those individuals who can identify every obscure member of someone's family, and recall instantly that Aunt Julia is the one who drinks like a fish, hates Indian food and always wears skirts. How do they do it? What's their secret?

I'm told that not remembering such things is simply down to poor concentration or not listening properly. Or even a lack of interest in other people. But I'm fascinated by other people and their personal quirks and lifestyles. I just have a memory like a sieve. A memory that thinks it's a waste bin.

Just remind me

I've always had a terrible memory. My past is but a sketchy outline, shorn of all the specifics and minutiae. I struggle to recall convers-ations I had a week ago, or who I had them with. The plots of films and books evaporate within days. Faces and names vanish rapidly, unless they're very distinctive.

This failing has obvious disadvantages. Someone will insist they met me on a previous occasion (or several), though I don't remember them at all. Someone will ask me what a book was about, and I frantically rack my brains. Someone will remind me of a decision we made last week, and I'll ask them what it was.

I'm well used to all the embarrassment, confusion, panic and vagueness this brings about, and the crafty attempts to feign memories and knowledge I don't actually possess. Sometimes if it's just too much to admit a total memory-blank, I'll find a way of skimming over it with some ambiguous remark.

But a bad memory also has its benefits.

Nasty experiences are soon forgotten, and I don't waste time dwelling on them and nurturing grievances. My head isn't clogged up with irrelevant detail so it's easier to get to the heart of something. If the plot of a book I've read escapes me, I can read it again with just as much pleasure.

I've forgotten all the absurd, pretentious and ill-informed rubbish I've written in the past and can confidently carry on writing as if my opinions are brilliantly astute. All the mindless tripe has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

But my inability to recall past events in any depth makes me wonder if they happened at all, or if the scrappy, threadbare images are entirely imaginary. No, that way madness lies....

Wandering minds

I'm extremely forgetful, but not because I'm old - I've been forgetful my whole life. And a new study says amnesia and scattiness are actually more common in young people.

We're all showing reduced attention and concentration spans and having more memory lapses, the reason being the sheer pressure and complexity of modern life.

A quarter of us regularly forget the names of close friends or relatives, and seven per cent even forget their own birthdays. Household accidents through carelessness are rising, and the average attention span has dropped to five minutes from twelve a decade ago.

But despite the stereotypes, the survey found the over-50s can concentrate better than young people, presumably because over the years they've learnt how to apply themselves and how to deal with pressure.

The decline is all due to the constant demands now being made on us - heavy workloads, urgent deadlines, endless emails, mobile phones, multi-tasking and new technology to name a few.

I certainly find myself that it's increasingly hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time without being distracted or my mind wandering to some essential task I need to do.

One cause of the growing distractedness is the nagging fear of "missing out" - that if we aren't constantly checking our emails, mobiles, TVs or our workmates' conversations, we might miss something vitally important or wildly exciting - or just someone's birthday. We don't want to be the gormless git who didn't know Britney had broken her leg.

I'm as prone to this anxiety as anyone else, being a news junkie, but it certainly doesn't do much for my peace of mind. Or my memory either, as I struggle to separate all the gossip from the shopping list and the bus timetable. What are we, human beings or sniffer dogs?

Distant memories

If there's one part of my body I'd like to improve, it's not my nose or biceps or bum, it's my dreadful memory - and the constant embarrassment it causes.

My father had a photographic memory, he could recall every detail of something that happened twenty years ago (quite mortifying when I desperately wanted him to forget some reckless or nasty action of mine). But I'm the exact opposite - if you asked me about a conversation I had last week, it would already be a hazy blur.

So I'm constantly forgetting people's names and jobs, whether they have children, where they live, that problem they asked me about a few days back, that difficult medical condition. I'm surprised I manage to retain all the thousand and one vital details of my own life, like bank accounts and holiday bookings.

It's not just early senility. I've always had a bad memory, even as a child. My mum would reel off all the little incidents from a seaside outing, and all that came to me was a vague image of sun, sea and sand.

So I rely heavily on bits of paper as memory back-up. Lists of Things To Do, notes of important conversations, downloaded news stories and reports, Notes To Self left in strategic places, and Questions To Ask when I talk to the doctor or podiatrist.

Which sounds pathetically gormless, but it's better than being totally flummoxed when Jenny asks me how much our hotel room's going to cost, if it has a bath or shower, and if it's air-conditioned. If I didn't have a Note, the details would have fluttered away like autumn leaves.

I really admire people with jobs that call for a prodigious memory - actors, singers, doctors, pilots. I'm always amazed that they can instantly recall exactly what they need so effortlessly.

I can just imagine the scene if I were a doctor. "That's a nasty-looking lump, Mrs O'Reilly. It could be a symptom of er, let me think for a few seconds. Would you like a cup of tea while we're waiting?" (That is, if I could remember how to boil the kettle)

I don't think Mrs O'Reilly would be long for this world.
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We all love bananas, don't we, boys and girls? Well, I read that we won't be enjoying them much longer, as they're being rapidly killed off by a lethal fungus - Panama Disease.

In five to thirty years' time, that delicious creamy taste could be a thing of the past. There are disease-resistant bananas that could be grown instead but they have a completely different taste - like lemons or apples. Perhaps we could readjust our taste buds?