PICTURE 07

All turned upside down

Dug from my hole in the ground

I used to be big.

PICTURE 06

I will swim for you

Dive, dance and entertain you

If you give me fish

PICTURE 05

Quite pale and pasty

When compared to T.V. ones.

It should be more pink.

PICTURE 04

Just a big fake cone

Promising a tasty treat

But unlickable.

PICTURE 03

A big cat watching

The children who laugh and point

Thinking about lunch.

PICTURE 02

Up above the roofs

Getting there means going through

The wild blue yonder.

PICTURE 01

Standing on a plate

All manner of tasty treats

Far too good to eat.

BREAK TIME

Ladies, gentlemen, and small furry aliens from the planet Zog (you know who you are), I have to announce that I have decided to take a short break from the wild and wacky world of bloggery for a few weeks. I know that this may disappoint a few of you and come as a great relief to the greater mass of humanity who regularly fervently ignore these musings, but a break is needed, and a break is what I’m going to get.

You could, if you were so inclined, take this opportunity to trawl through the back catalogue of over 500 musings and ravings that have been posted here over the past couple of years and pause for a few moments to consider what it is that you will no doubt wisely conclude that it is probably best to continue studiously ignoring.

Still, for those of you who do remain, and with the hopeful philosophy that a picture really should speak a thousand words, and which therefore will no doubt come as some blessed relief, I will be posting some pictures for you to have a look at. None of them are particularly good, but they’re pretty enough and might help to pass the days in the unlikely event that any of you find that you’re actually missing me.

You might want to think of them as a kind of jigsaw puzzle of the not-that-complicated enigma that these writings represent, or perhaps you might want to think of them as making up the “picture clue” round of this great game that we sometimes play, and you might even want to surprise me with your conclusions, or not, although it might take me a while to get around to reading your comments and “moderating” them so don’t go thinking that I don’t care or that they’ve got lost or anything.

Far from it…

If anything, it’s more likely that it’s me that’s got myself lost, so, if I can impose upon you to you to be a little patient (as the doctor said to the tiny baby…) then normal service will be resumed just as soon as I can get around to it, and the merry daily dance that we dance will be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve not been around.

The games I like to play, eh, people…? The games I like to play.

“Don’t forget me…”


Martin AW Holmes, Word wrangler, February 2012

BIG SCARY WORLD

I tend, much like Mycroft Holmes, to pretty much run on rails. Apart from the rare and very odd deviation from my routine, I can usually be found in one of three places, and if I’m not in any of those, I’m either somewhere restocking one or other of them, or I’m travelling between them. It’s a small world, it’s a safe world, it’s a world I understand and it’s one that makes some kind of sense to me. Venturing beyond its very definite boundaries rarely sits all that well with me, and I tend to treat such expeditions with a certain amount of fear and loathing, even though, usually it all turns out fine in the end.

It was for the very reason of the predictability of my whereabouts that I struggled for many years with the vexing issue of mob-illy teffalones and whether I actually needed one. I reasoned quite reasonably that I was so rarely anywhere else that if anyone needed to get in touch with me there were three places they could track me down and leave a message and maybe have to wait for me to get back to them. Shock! Horror! Or that if I was anywhere else it was reasonable (there’s that word again...) to assume that I was either on my way there and probably driving anyway and therefore unable to take their call, or perhaps in some kind of a social situation where a telephone conversation might seem inappropriate.

I know, I know... it’s an old-fashioned view that there might just be times when the people you’re actually with might seem more interesting than those who ring you up whilst you’re out, or that you might just have to wait to have a conversation with someone, but there you go. The big scary world of my youth was a simpler scary place, but we survived.

Anyway, it was all academic anyway. The phone pretty much stopped ringing and I faded into relative social obscurity. Perhaps that’s the real fear of all those people I still see with their ears clamped to the little boxes that rule their lives, that they will somehow fall off the grid if they’re not constantly reminding other people that they’re there...?

Such a position became even more irrelevant when I found that I had to have one of those terrible little boxes for work, but I can say with some satisfaction that the discovery that I can actually choose to switch the thing off when I’m on my own time has gone some way towards keeping the big scary world at bay.

I have always struggled with the unknown and the uncontrollable, where factors beyond my control can cause situations I am in to get out of hand. This is why when I enjoy, say, an evening in a particular restaurant, it is more likely that I shall return to that same place at some future date rather than more adventurously venturing further afield. Once I know how a place works, I am more comfortable with it and likely to feel more confident that the next time it will be a known quantity and I am less likely to be afraid that I will commit some massive gaffe, walk through the wrong door, or do something that doesn’t sit well with the routine of the place, and have to live with all the social embarrassments and breaches of etiquette that this entails.

Otherwise, there are so many questions: What’s the ordering system? Do they come to you or do you have to go to the counter? Where are the toilets? Are the gratuities included? An entire cascade of possibilities and problems that need to be allowed for, calculated, and controlled in order to be able to enjoy a relaxing evening with a glass of mulled Vimto and a Pork Pie.

No wonder I don’t go out much any more. It’s all far too scary...

“So, how do I cope with holidays then?”, I don’t hear you ask... Well, it’s quite easy really. I have a total cultural meltdown and remain twitchy for about 24 hours and then I sort of “adapt” in a “rabbit caught in the headlamps” kind of a way. It took me about a week to “go native” the last time I was in France, and even America with its familiar cultural landmarks and (almost) common language can find me feeling out of my depth and in need of a bit of a hug. Egypt, however, did seem like it was going to be a culture clash too far for someone like me who blends in in much the way that Dr Marcus Brody had to that time, but in the end, apart from a few tricky moments, we were safely placed within the protection of the tourism “bubble” and had a lovely, if constantly wary old time of it.

I’m actually rather fond of the “bubble”. It’s served me rather well over the years in coping with the big scary world now that I’ve adapted it for domestic purposes. Sometimes it does make you seem perhaps a little “stand-offish”, but I find that it’s a small price to pay for the relative security and protection it provides me with.

Outside of it, there is a big, scary, unknown and unknowable place, the bigger, wider world. You know it well, I’m sure. It is, after all where you all live, but to me it can seem, quite frankly, terrifying. Every time I switch on the TV these days, which is, after all, my own little “window on the world” I am reminded what a big scary world that there is out there, and occasionally, because that’s the nature of “telly”, what a wonderful place it can also seem to be, too. It leads, of course, to a rather “bipolar” relationship with the world which means that my desire to interact with it, or not, can turn on a sixpence, which you may very well have noticed if you are a regular reader of this gibberish. What is a rather emphatic position today can be more enigmatic tomorrow. Like with many things, any actual opinion may remain an enigma, wrapped in a conundrum and folded into a souffle of mystery, but then that’s precisely the nature of the big scary world in my head.

Or perhaps I’m just fickle...

One thing that the TV does very well, of course, is to remind me that my own little troubles really don’t add up to much in the great scheme of things and I should, perhaps, just shut the hell up about my tiny little troubles, when the peoples of the world are blowing each other up in the name of progress, although venturing out does seem less likely when our own lords and masters are carping on about such things as “The scandal of public drunkenness” as if it’s a new thing.

Has he never seen a Hogarth print?

Come to think of it, there’s a fair chance he owns a few...

Of course it all does come down to my own fear and cowardice, I would never try to deny it. It’s just the way that I’ve been put together, and I’ve (sort of) got used to it over the years. It doesn’t make life any simpler, though. Still, travel can broaden the mind, they say, and I am actually on the very brink of venturing out into that big wide and scary old world for a couple of weeks fairly soon, so, when I have done that I might be a much more mellow person for a while until it all wears off, so, when I’ve been and gone and done that (it is still a while off yet), I’ll see you on the other side, I hope, and no doubt want to tell you all about it then.

Oh great, they shuddered. Yet another idiot boring us to tears with his holiday snaps...

Well, that’s as maybe but there’s a big wide world out there just waiting for you and which needs embracing.

I told you I was fickle...

NO GRIT

I got invited to a birthday party last weekend. Now I’m sure a lot of you normal, rational people will be thinking “Aw, that’s nice!” but of course I didn’t go.

I don’t think that I was ever really expected to, if the truth is being told. Not that anyone would have minded if I had shown up, in fact I’m sure that one or two might have been delighted, but most people who know me know me, and so their expectations remain understandably very low.

The message inviting me along popped in on my answerphone a couple of weeks ago but already mentioned in the invitation itself that I am known to be wary of attending such events but it would be nice to see me if I chose to appear. I replied with a few emails expressing gratitude for the invitation but which remained more ambiguous about my eventual intentions.

Whilst my beloved better half already had “venue” issues, and was never likely to be persuaded to join me, my own position was far more ambiguous. After all, there are certain people in life for whom you are far more likely to make the “effort” and this was indeed one of them, so I gathered together as many of my wits as I was able to track down and managed to at least half persuade myself to go and, right up until about half an hour before I was due to leave, this was the position I took, even though my recent catastrophic levels of insomnia had left me yawning the afternoon away and half dozing off to yet another cricket commentary.

Then the fear gripped me.

Visions of standing alone and unknown in a room full of enthusiastic people in a jolly frame of mind started to form in my mind. The notion of questions and chatter and making small talk started to spiral around and around in my head and, despite the fact that there were likely to be one or two faces there that I knew it would be nice to catch up with, the overwhelming fear of the rest of it was far, far stronger. That, along with the ongoing levels of fatigue and the brewing after-effects of a teatime curry, due in no small part to the stomach-churning anticipation of the merest possibility of an impending social function, set my spirits once more to “panic stations” and instead of heading upstairs to get ready, I took my more usual route of utter cowardice and cried off, or rather decided to simply not go.

Suddenly, with that decision made, I felt more relaxed than I had all day. Granted there will be repercussions, there always are. I did have the presence of mind to post a birthday card to the celebrant midweek but after that I found out that I might have even got the wrong end of the stick over that. Further research told me that the birthday date in question seemed to have been a couple of months ago, making my little card seem rather after the fact, although I still maintain that you really can’t have a birthday party without at least a few birthday cards.

Then I began to wonder whether this was perhaps a more “significant” event than I thought. After all, most people don’t book a venue for any old birthday, but nothing had been said along those lines, so I thought, perhaps, that it was just far easier to have such a thing somewhere else rather than in your own home, a bit like the mums and dads seem to do nowadays with a bunch of eight-year olds to avoid any significant damage to their precious things.

Hmm! Perhaps in my ignorance I have committed yet another massive social faux pas, something else to make any future dealings in such matters, should there ever be any, even more confusing to deal with as I dance the strange mental dance I always seem to have with them.

It’s such a ruddy minefield this social lark…

Instead, and rather ironically, I put the latest rental disc in the DVD player; The new version of “True Grit” by the Coen brothers. A film all about bravery which seemed massively inappropriate to my own cowardly inactions of the evening. It’s a perfectly good and enjoyable film which looks magnificent, and I did rather enjoy a script what refused to have any truck with diminutives, but somehow, I fear, won’t make quite the same impact on the memory as the John Wayne version did nearly forty years earlier, despite having many of the same beats, and by next weekend I will probably be wondering quite what that film was we watched last weekend.

“Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch!”

Perhaps to younger minds it will make more of an impact, of course. When you get to my age (much uncelebrated though my own birthdays have tended to be), any remake has to get beyond the weight of the history of the original, but to fresh young minds coming to it anew, it might just seem wild, exciting and different enough to make an impression so that they’ll be talking about it with similar enthusiasm when the next version is made.

So, another evening passed with me choosing not to engage fully with the world. Instead I seem to choose to communicate with it by means of these much-ignored little ramblings and observations which do, at least, seem to not fill me with quite the same level of social angst that going out appears to do, and, if the world chooses not to engage right back with me, as in the main it doesn’t, well I can hardly blame anyone for that.

After all, if I choose to never show up at the party, why should they join in with mine?

ECOUTEZ ET REPETEZ

“Jean-Paul et Marie-France et dans la cuisine… Beep!”

“Jonn. Pawl. Ett. Marree. Fronce. Ett. Don. Ler. Coo. Zeen.”

“Ou et les legumes?... Beep!”

“Oo. Ate. Lays. Leggooms.”

“Claudette et dans la salle de bain… Beep!”

“Clordett. Ett. Don. Lar. Salderbann.”

“Ou et le savon?... Beep!”

“Oo. Ate. Ler. Savvon.”

I swear to God (or whatever...) that the first time I ever went to France I half expected every sentence to end with a slightly hopeful beep, and I suspect that, if cornered, my immediate response would have been to repeat whatever French had been garbled at me straight back at whoever it was, albeit adjusted for my own mangled hearing of it and with my own hideously flattened vowels scraping across the eardrums of the unfortunate listener as I throttled that most lyrical of tongues beyond the realms of reason.

Mr Griffiths was never really all that impressed by my skills in French. Despite teaching me the subject for five long years, which I suspect probably seemed to last twice as long for him, I don’t expect that we ever really got much beyond what was absolutely necessary for me to scrape that pass at “O” level. It wasn’t his fault, of course. I’m sure that if I’d been a gifted linguist or even showed the remotest sign of having a passion for languages above and beyond the call of necessity, he’d have put a whole lot of energy into encouraging me, because he was a nice bloke was Mr G.

Sadly, for him, instead he got me and my contractually obligated interest in French. We had to do it, so we did it, and we did no more than we had to do. My homework was approached with about as much understanding as I might have given to trying to speak fluent slug, and I was about as successful at it as I would have been with such a pointless task, too.

As I get older, not being fluent in other languages has become, like my inability to successfully wrangle a musical implement, a source of slight regret. In my mind, of course, I would love to have lived the life of the polymath, gaining expertise in so many fields and excelling at even one thing which might be considered a marvel or a unique ability to someone. Somehow to be un homme des letters, to be able to speak the language of lerve, or perhaps something slightly more übertechnik is always going to be somebody else’s pleasure.

It’s nobody else’s fault, of course, after all the opportunity was there but, despite all the efforts of Mr Griffiths, and also his colleague Mr Brammall as he struggled to get some German to stick in my synapses, it seems it was all in vain. I can only claim now to have a “smattering” of either, and I suspect to even claim that borders upon exaggeration.

I think the writing was on the wall even then, however, because despite the threats of  detentions for retests for those of us failing to make the cut during the weekly vocab tests, I rarely seemed to improve much beyond the mean, so much so that it was the language examinations that were sat with a promise from my parents that I wouldn’t be made to resit them if I failed to pass those particular ones.

Strangely enough, the fact that I did actually scrape a pass in both which was, I think, as much of a surprise to the teachers as it was to me, especially after the strange muttering and other indecipherable grunts that resulted from the recording session that made up the “oral” part of the process, as I never really successfully got to grips with the technological mysteries of the “language lab”. Sadly for them, many of that year’s supposed “Grade A” students (I always did resent Mr B for his demarcation of the layout of his class seating positions in that manner) also got the same grade as me, which wasn’t due to any overachievement on my part, I’m sure, but probably goes to prove something in classroom theory.

Happily for me (at the time), I was able to go forward into my life with those little letters in boxes on a scrap of paper behind me and never look back, and, much to my mother’s chagrin as she was a bit of a fan of learning languages, I never had to spend any time with a language text book, or in a recording booth looking flustered and more than a little embarrassed, ever again. I was free. Language learning was behind me.

Huzzah!

Only…

I dunno. Nowadays, I really wish I had tried a bit harder. Being multilingual just seems such a wonderful thing to be able to be. That skill to be able to make yourself understood in another country, and engage with its people un-self-consciously and without embarrassment must be the most marvellous of feelings.

Perhaps that was always the problem, that crippling fear of making a fool of myself that has nobbled so many of my plans and hopes across the decades. I once went on holiday with someone who was a French teacher and they were completely furious when I wouldn’t even attempt to ask for the bill (“L’addition s’il vous plait?”) in French, despite my very reasonable assertion (I thought) that they would be far better at doing it than I could hope to be. I don’t know, though, maybe they had a point. Perhaps it really is all still in there somewhere, despite my very best efforts to deny it, and all I needed to do was try.

I remember going on holiday to Normandy a good fourteen years after my last ever French lesson and going into a pizzeria just as soon my friends and I left the boat, and being only able to attempt a sullen pointing and “Cheers” combination when it came around to my turn to order, even after all of my fellow diners had gamely attempted to order in the Lingua Franca. A few days later, during that same holiday, I was left alone in a beach café whilst they all went off on more exciting challenges, and I had a lovely afternoon ordering my drinks and food and even managing a smattering of conversation, all in French and without any English onlookers to mock me and it was all just fine and rather lovely, to be honest.

Granted I was unlikely to win any awards for linguistic skill, but I got by, and within the week was accurately dredging up various words and phrases from Mr Griffith’s vocab tests of so many years before. I like to think that he would have been proud of me that day. He was a good egg, was Mr G. I remember our last couple of hours as teacher and pupils vividly, when he decided that “If we didn’t know it now, we never would” and instead just spent a couple of hours chatting to us like the grown ups it turns out we weren’t really. I can clearly remember him telling us about when he was a young teacher, and trying to engage other young minds in a new first year intake. They were stood talking next to a poster and, in an effort to be “matey” he tried to show an interest in the poster himself and, as he put it, “They ripped me to pieces for the next five years!”

A life lesson well learned, and, you’ll have noticed, one he left until the very last lesson to share with us.

Très bien!

GHOST TOWN

Just under six years ago, I spent a chunk of a September day walking around a ghost town, relatively high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. The town was called Bodie and it was once a vital cog in the gold mining industry, but when the mine stopped being profitable and the jobs dried up, the town began its slow decline until only one resident remained and, when he died, the town was bequeathed to the U.S. Department of the Interior who designated it a National Historic Landmark and began to preserve the remaining 170 or so buildings in a state of “arrested decay” although it struggles to remain open with constant funding cuts.

Lying at over 8000 feet above sea level, it must have been a brutal place to live even without the bandits and desperados who seem to have made up a large number of its inhabitants.

I can’t really remember what drew us to head on through Yosemite Park that year and drag ourselves over the spectacular Tioga Pass to Lee Vining and its impressive Whoa Nellie Deli, famous for its incredible breakfasts supplied to both burly hill-walkers and tourists of a far less hardy build. I think perhaps we’d seen a documentary partially filmed at one of the California ghost towns and thought that they might be interesting places to visit, and Bodie was the one nearest to the places that we intended to drive to.

I know that we thought that it was terribly decadent (and possibly just a little self-indulgent) of us to drive through Yosemite just as a way of getting to somewhere else, and I remember finding the scenery along the Tioga Pass so incredibly spectacular as I was driving along that it was almost far too much more distracting than was good for me.

We arrived at Lee Vining on a Saturday evening after a long drive and were rather alarmed to find out that there was precious little in the way of available motel rooms available. Luckily, the rather excellent visitor center pointed us towards the nice little town of June Lake just up the highway and we managed to find a pleasant little house to rent for the weekend, to nurture our brewing headaches as we adjusted to the thin air, because at around 8000 feet, the lack of oxygen really does take some adjusting to.

The next day we headed on up to Bodie itself and spent the day quietly strolling around one of the most eerie and yet fascinating places that I have ever had the pleasure to have visited. Some of the houses are long gone, having simply fallen down, or burned or after having been trashed by that first generation of “teenagers” back in the 1950s before it was put under government protection, but around about 170 remain, some admittedly much the worse for wear, but others looking rather like the inhabitants only moved out yesterday. Pots and pans and boxes of groceries still sit on shelves when you peer in through window panes, and armchairs and beds are still in the positions they were left in when the residents finally departed.

The tour guides were keen to warn us to drink lots of water and to warn them if we felt at all faint, but I think that the fascination of this lost world really meant that, for me, that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Old cars and other engineering paraphernalia litter the site and you are not allowed to move any of it. There is no “little shop” to buy snacks in, no café to get a drink, and littering is strictly forbidden in an area that seemed to be almost frozen in time, and yet, despite all of the decay, it’s a surprisingly hypnotic and beautiful place, and has proved to be a rather photogenic inspiration to any number of photographers over the years.

My visit was made, of course, in the days before I had any compact digital cameras to travel with, so it was left to my memory to try and absorb the moment, by just sitting down on a bench for a few minutes and trying to let it all sink in. The photos the beloved took also helped, too, of course, but I do remain rather haunted by that abandoned little wooden town that speaks volumes about an age and a lifestyle long-ago lost. How hard life must have been for them then, with their bitter winters, the constant roar of the mining machinery, the thinness of the air and the sheer brutality of pioneer living. I mean, it’s no picnic for the people living up there nowadays either; The Tioga Pass is closed for much of the winter, and even in September in California, I woke up to find ice on my car windscreen and got into trouble for going for a morning stroll without telling anyone where I was going.

There were Grizzlies about, I later discovered, and this was really not the wisest thing to have done.

CARRY ON BLOGGING

More than once recently I’ve reached the point of giving up on these vague musings and sending them out into the ether each day wondering whether it really is worth doing something when it fails to satisfy so few people in such a meagre number of ways.

“Ooh well... if you’re not being satisfied...”

Who said that? Ah yes, those oh-so familiar voices in my head which speak to me, and the scornful faces of those who dislike me, swim into my mind and jeer...

“We knew you couldn’t keep it up…”

“I’ll say! It was such a disappointment for a young girl…”

...because they’ve then transmogrified into a terrifying vision of Hattie Jacques in a “Carry On” film, smiling tartly with just the hint of a twinkle behind the eyes that this sort of thing, for an actress of her standing, is really beneath her…

“If only…” (Matron sighs and rolls her eyes coyly)

… but that she still finds it funny anyway, to be in at the creation of yet another fine, matronly dose of double entendre...

“I wish I was beneath her! Har, har, harrr!”

So, let’s get something straightened out…

“Ooh, yes please!”

“You asked me to give it to you straight once… Fnarf! Fnarf!”

…once and for all. Sometimes I just find it really hard...

“Think yourself lucky. I haven’t found anything hard since V.E. Day...”

“What did you say...?”

“V.E. day, dear... My that got his dander up!”

“I’ll say! Yak! Yak Yak!”

“Saucy!”

“Now, back in to bed with you...”

“I thought you’d never arsk!”

... Now, stop messing about. I was saying that I find really hard in the morning...

“No need to worry about that. It’s perfectly normal...”

“There’s nothing normal about that one...”

“Come now, nurse...”

“I nearly did, Matron...”

“Now it’s nothing you haven’t seen before...”

“I wouldn’t describe that as being nothing, Matron...”

…in the morning to come up…

“Oo-er!”

 …with anything new to say. I seem to suffer from a series of small disappointments…

“Well you always will if it’s disappointingly small...”

…I don’t seem to get any ideas…

“That’s not what you said last night! Phwoar!”

…and I’m pretty regular…

“This’ll keep you regular, phnarf!”

…at losing my inspiration and my will is sometimes very weak…

“Yeees, that’s very common in a man of your age…”

…I mean, I’m hardly an expert at touch-typing…

“Well you’re just my type and you can touch me any time you like...”

…and sometimes it does seem like everyone’s got it in for me…

“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

…sometimes the flesh is willing…

“Frying tonight!”

…but the will is still weak…

“Yes, I had noticed…”

“Fire at will!”

“’ere, what you got against Will…?”

…but then, every time I do decide to stop, I find an excuse to start again, sometimes thinking that I should try instead to be a “Once a week” man…

“I was once a weak man…”

“Once a week should be enough for any man!”

…Sometimes I just lose all interest in doing it at all…

“Yeees, that’s very common in a man of your age…”

Didn’t we do that one already…?

“Well you try keeping it up all the time”

“Chance’d be a fine thing…”

“There’s nothing fine about my thing…”

“Oh, I don’t know…” (Matron sighs and rolls her eyes coyly)

Oh… please yourselves….

MEMORY SLUM

I had a lousy night’s sleep. I woke up about half past midnight and, for hour after hour after that, my mind was bombarded by random images and memories, which bludgeoned me into full consciousness. It’s almost as if, having opened up the “memory palace”, someone had decided to upturn the box and drop the whole lot on my head.

I suppose that I could have got up and tried to write it all down, a tried and trusted technique of getting it out of my head and onto paper so I stop worrying about forgetting it, but there was so much of it, I suspect that I’d have been up all night anyway.

Let me try to explain how I got myself into this predicament.

A couple of morning’s back, the Breakfast news people decided to take a fatuous and shallow look at the matter of memory. Oh, how they patronised, oh, how they implied that somehow, if we listened to their wise words for about three minutes, we too would never, ever lose our car keys ever again. The ironic thing, of course, is that with morning breakfast news broadcasts, they tend to repeat the same stories for three consecutive hours to cover the various times that people choose to greet their day, and so each time around it was almost as if they’d forgotten that they’d already told this tale.

Luckily, I only saw it the once.

Of the three minutes making up this particular segment, about a minute and a half of their allotted time was devoured by showing a long clip from a “Sherlock” episode to try and make it seem relevant to the telly-devouring zombies that they seem to imply we all are, using a plug for one of their own dramas to explain the blindingly obvious topic which they were talking about, just in case we moronic viewers didn’t manage to understand the concept of what a “memory” is I suppose.

The “memory expert” they then briefly interviewed had much to say in a very short time about the memory techniques that he himself had mastered to championship level, and was then cut off to go to some other item on geese or something. I don’t actually know. This is  not from a lack of memory, but because I left the room to go and do something more interesting instead.

Actually, it wasn’t all that interesting, because it was to go and put the empty tea mugs next to the sink, and, although in comparison I might be suggesting that this was actually a more interesting thing to do, it wasn’t really. I only thought I’d better mention it to prove that I did actually remember what I did.

People in glass houses and all that…

Before I went off and did that, however, the “memory expert” (he had a book to plug) touched upon the topic of “memory palaces” which seems to be a topic much in vogue at the moment, appearing as it does in quite a few books and dramas lately, of which “Sherlock” was merely only the most recent example, although it is a far older technique. It’s actually mentioned, for example, in the Thomas Harris “Hannibal Lector” book “Hannibal”, and I just used that very same method to remember the author’s name instead of looking it up on the internet like I would normally do. Visualise the bookshelf… move along to “Silence of the Lambs”… Top shelf… Right hand side… Ah! There you go: Thomas Harris!

Mine’s obviously more of a “memory library” but never mind…

However, one thing that he did suggest as being a good way of remembering the small things like where it is you’ve put things down, was the making of trivial moments memorable (and, of course, remembering to do this as you’re doing so…). So, for example, you might think of a firework exploding, or something equally bizarre or incongruous, to make the moment itself memorable when you, for example, put down your glasses or your car keys. As the man said, if you walked into your living room one day and found an unexpected clown juggling there you’d never forget it (and you’d probably run like hell), so you’re just using the same idea to help you remember more trivial things.

We are, after all, becoming a society that doesn’t have to remember stuff because we carry devices with us everywhere so that we can look things up. We no longer feel the need to retain knowledge and it has become something that is regarded as being unusual, which is why, I suppose, when “clever” people manage such feats on our televisions we can be extremely impressed, and why quiz champions sometimes really do seem to be quite extraordinary.

“How do you remember this stuff?” is a phrase that has haunted me over the years. I do because I do, and because I take the trouble to. In one job, it made my life easier to remember just where certain reference images were in the filing system, and so I became a useful resource for some of my colleagues who, it seemed, couldn’t retain that sort of stuff, or perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered to do something so banal. I still think that I have a lousy memory, but that seemed to be a useful thing to do precisely because it made the job a lot easier and I could never really fathom why other people didn’t do it. It was them choosing not to do it that seemed the more unusual choice to me.

I can still dredge up the most bizarre things despite never, ever having got the knack of absorbing and remembering names. That’s a huge flaw I have and people sometimes suggest that it displays a lack of interest in people, but, no matter what I do, names just don’t seem to sink in. Neither do happy moments unless I really take a moment and force myself to try and remember. Some holidays I have almost completely forgotten and I swear that if it wasn’t for certain photograph albums I have, most of my precious memories would be just so many melted icebergs. These days I have to truly try and force myself to try and remember a specific moment whilst it is happening, or else I can come away from somewhere like the Pyramids for example, without ever really feeling like I was ever really there.

Nevertheless, now that the rather fascinating topic of memory technique had been broached, however slightly, my mind was fully committed to finding out more, and what interesting stuff it is. Sometimes the seemingly chaotic layout of a “memory palace” seems arbitrary and random, but it does make some kind of sense to the owner, a bit like the madness that is our little house does. Although when you look around our tiny and chaotic hovel it resembles something more like a memory slum than a palace, but that’s just the way I seem to live. I like to occasionally claim that it’s because I know where everything is and “I have a system” which means that the status quo of clutter needs to be maintained, but I don’t think I’m fooling anyone with that one, am I?

Anyway, having been reminded of the notion of a “memory palace” and learned a few tips on improving memory, I decided to put it to the test and promptly visualised my fireworks and explosions as I went about my evening. I wonder quite what you do if you attach a firework image to absolutely everything that you want to remember, of course, but the three minutes I saw didn’t really cover that.

So off I toddled to jolly old Bedfordshire only to wake at midnight with my brain bursting with all sorts of long-forgotten memories to keep me awake through the long dark hours.

One of the things that I think we all dread is the loss of our memories and our faculties, but that night I could have quite happily forgotten everything if it meant a few decent hours sleep.

PARAGRAPH: EIGHT

Three Steps 

Last weekend, we watched a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. I don’t suppose that in itself is all that incredible. I’m sure that lots of people did much the same thing, and, to be honest, Clint Eastwood has directed so many fine movies it must be an even more common thing to do than I thought it was when I first mentioned it, but it’s not the actual “watching” of the film that I am thinking about today, it’s the connection I suddenly made in my head whilst I was suffering from a bout of insomnia a few nights later. Now, if the truth is being told, I don’t know all that many people. In the great social scheme of things, I barely trouble the scorers, but nevertheless, playing a small but significant role in this film was an actor who once attended the same wedding as I did. We didn’t talk or anything, which is probably just as well as I have a tendency to gush terribly and become ever so ridiculously “over impressed” whenever I meet someone who’s face I recognise, and because he did have a small part in the “Beiderbecke Trilogy” (which is a personal favourite), I suspect that I might very well have done precisely that, no doubt to great mutual embarrassment, if we had actually had a moment to talk. Mind you, I do think that one of our “bathroom breaks” coincided at one point, and one of us held the door open to let the other one in or something like that. This was, however, as close as we got. Anyway, putting all of that aside, the thought that struck me was this: Despite not knowing hardly anyone, we have friends who we consider to be intimate enough that they invited us to their wedding, and they also have a friend (or perhaps even a relative) who has been in a Clint Eastwood film which means that, if you want to play the “six degrees of separation” game, I am only three steps (friend + friend + Clint) from Clint flippin’ Eastwood, and the links to the great and the good that this connection brings suddenly makes me feel (in a terribly small way) like I could be a “player”, even though I’m palpably not one. Not only that, because Matt Damon is also in the film, I’m only four steps from George Clooney, which might have at one time rather impressed that girl who once dumped me via answerphone one long-ago Saturday afternoon, and who, I seem to remember, had a picture of George hanging in her kitchen for her to... drool over, I suppose. Certainly, in comparison, I seemed to give her little to drool about, but I digress, and it was hardly George’s fault that I didn’t measure up to him. The reason I’m telling you all of this is not to brag about the fact that I know someone who knows someone who knows Clint Eastwood, because that would be a patently ridiculous thing to do, although it does actually amaze me now that I think about it because I’m still the same obscure little nobody I’ve always been and show no signs of ceasing to be so, but to point out that there might very well actually be something in this “six degrees” mularkey after all. After all, if an antisocial smudge on the landscape like me can be connected, however obliquely, to the great and the good, maybe we really are more fundamentally connected as a society that I was prepared to believe, and perhaps, when more of us come to realise this, we might just start to learn to live together and try to make a better world. There is, it would seem, and despite my many doubts, hope for us all after all.