This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 06/03/15
What Did I Come In Here For?
I don't know whether it is simply a factor of ageing or whether there is something more sinister at work, but I think my mind is starting to fall apart.
I have periods, for example, when my ability to type just grabs the first train out of town and blows raspberries at me from the guard's van. This tends to happen most when I really need to get something done quickly, and I have had as many as four or five attempts at typing quite straightforward words (not even the ones which I have noted before as presenting particular challenges).
I seem now to have increasing difficulty in remembering people's names; or, at least, remembering them as easily as once I did. I think, however, that this may be genetic; my mother only had me and my brother to negotiate around (at least, after our sister died), but she would call the one of us rather than the other more than half the time - even if the 'wrong' one wasn't even present at the time. Her mother, my Nain, was worse; she would go through all of my mother's siblings' names to arrive at hers - and all the others were boys.
But it's no longer confined to proper nouns. The other Sunday afternoon, standing in the kitchen cooking, I simply couldn't bring to mind - let alone to mouth - the word I was seeking. I knew the concept described by the word, of course, but was seemingly powerless to recall the word which best encapsulated that concept.
I pummelled the increasingly intractable mush between my ears for all of fifteen or twenty minutes in an attempt to force the wretched dictionary entry out of its dark hidey-hole; trying all those little tricks that one deploys on such occasions, like going through the alphabet to try to forge an association, and then even going through the alphabet backwards, as if sneaking up on the bastard might work better (this technique seldom works in any case, of course; when the word finally does decide to uncloak itself, it tends not to start with the letter that you thought it did).
Finally, after a period of increasing exasperation, bordering on panic, the word finally deigned to make its appearance.
And the word was...?
'Amnesia'
I suppose that it was inevitable that at some point my brain would follow the execrable example set by various other parts of my corpus by letting me down with increasing frequency, but I had hoped that I would at least reach the stage where I had the leisure to luxuriate in my galloping befuddlement before what Woody Allen described as his "second-favorite organ" started to crumble.
Erm...could someone remind me what this piece was going to be about, please?
