Memories are made of this

Recently when I was in a computer store I saw a sign that said ‘Memory now cheaper than ever.’

Umm, I thought, that is interesting. Well, okay I don’t actually remember if that’s what I thought, and well that is kinda what I’m trying to get at.

You see even though most of us acknowledge what a fantastic thing it is to have use of our memory, to be honest we don’t make the best of it.

And so, we forget things. Maybe we think we remember most of the important stuff, but we still forget things.

Like for instance putting something in the oven and forgetting to turn it on...or indeed putting something in the oven and forgetting to turn it off. Or forgetting to pay a bill or forgetting you were supposed to meet somebody or phone somebody at a certain time.

The great thing though is that it is never our fault, unlike say a computer.

You see if a computer’s memory plays up then the computer, or the memory in the computer is faulty and needs repaired, but humans are much more clever than computers, so we just blame somebody else.

It is, without a doubt, the biggest get out clause we use and we use it time and time again, the old ... “now will you remind me to...”

It’s all you have to do really to make sure that if you do forget something, you can right away turn to the person you said that line to, give them the most indignant look ever and say... “you were supposed to remind me!”

What I can never understand about that is why anyone thinks the other person has a better memory than them in the first place?

I often get asked to remind people of things and I invariably forget, but since I have trouble remembering my own stuff I’m not certain that I try too hard to have stuff that other people ask me cluttering up my head as well.

I put this down to an incident many years ago when a player from an opposing football team thought the spot just above my right eye would be a good place to put his knee.

As the saying goes I woke up with a crowd around me. To be honest I can’t exactly say if I’d been hit by a knee or a shin or maybe even a piece of debris from a falling meteor – all I can remember is going along to the game and sometime later waking up, flat on my back, with a sea of faces staring down at me before being rushed off to hospital.

Eighteen or twenty-one stitches later (it is one of the two of those numbers I’m pretty sure but I can’t remember exactly) people remarked at my wonderful cut and my blackened face but all I was worried about was the two or three minutes that have been lost to me forever because I was knocked out.

Since then however I’ve been able to use that bad knock on the head to explain my fairly scatty memory (it might account for other things like the content in this blog too), but to be honest it’s just another get out clause I can use for being too lazy to make sure I use my memory properly.

And I’m not proud of that. In fact, I’m determined that from now on I’m going to really work hard at remembering stuff and using the memory that has been given to me.

Now all I need is for everyone who reads this to remind me of that...