Non Volatile Memory Required

Returning to the subject of my being forgetful, I had to laugh at myself last Saturday. I have recently embarked on an interesting and inspiring correspondence with a charming man I met at an exhibition in Brick Lane. We have a shared interest in Poetry - though his is much more developed than my own infant endeavours – and I am enjoying being introduced to writers new to me.

As my own interests have mainly centred around human relationships, and in particular the love between a man and a woman, he recommended a number of texts I should read on the subject. Such is my renewed enthusiasm and eagerness to re-engage with this theme in my work, that I abandoned his letter half way through, and immediately logged onto Amazon to order said texts, after which I returned to read the rest. As I looked at his list again, it dawned on me that one of the books, Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving", I had read not more than two weeks previously, it having been recommended to me by a visitor to my stand at the latest Untitled Artfair. This little book was my bedtime reading for several nights and I read it from cover to cover, finding it both enlightening and stimulating .... So how had I managed to forget the title less than 14 days later? If that wasn't frustrating enough, it seems it’s not possible to cancel an order once placed with Amazon (even within 5 minutes of submitting it), and the returns policy involves you reselling the book (which I don’t want to get into), so if anyone would like my brand new spare copy, please email me your address and it will be yours by return.

I have been concerned for some time that my powers of recall are poor, but it is deeply worrying that my memory now equals that of a goldfish. Is this because my brain cells are jumping ship at an alarming rate, or is this a temporary condition arising because I have, for the last three years, been in a permanent state of stress and anxiety? In this space of time, I have morphed from "Superwoman", juggling husband, children, home, work, property development, social life, and corporate wife duties, to a ditzy, frayed round the edges, easily flustered, dinner burning, kitchen flooding, scatterbrain. My organisational skills have vanished into thin air, and I flit from task to task, half-finishing things and forgetting from one minute to the next what I’m supposed to be doing. I think this is why I keep losing things too. Carrying rubbish in one hand and an article I’m putting away in the other, the rubbish ends up in a cupboard or drawer, and presumably all those lost items are now in some landfill.

The night I met my new Poet friend, he asked if I’d read any of the work of Carol Ann Duffy, our new Poet Laureate. I think I must have said I hadn’t as I didn’t recall at all the fact that I had in my possession four of her books. Opening one of the boxes of my books this weekend that have been in storage for the last two and a half years, I found her Selected Poems, The World’s Wife, Feminine Gospels, and Rapture. Now I’m not pretending I had read them all, but I had obviously dipped into them, because several pages were marked and annotated. I was of course delighted to find them but at the same time frustrated that I hadn’t remembered I’d got them. I would have so loved to have impressed him with my literary knowledge. I also have the same problem in the book club I belong to which meets seven or eight times a year. I have often been amazed and embarrassed that when we talk about the other stuff (fiction) we've been reading, I can’t even remember what I’d been reading the previous week, let alone the month before. And these all worthy, acclaimed books. I'm going to have to start writing down all my reads in a notebook with a little synopsis to remind me. The only good thing about this is that with being on an economy drive in the current recession, I can save myself lots of money by re-reading the hundreds of books I have without remembering the plots or the endings.

I would like to understand what is going on in my brain though, and why I seem to have no ability to digest and retain the texts I spend hours reading and enjoying. Should I be worried? Or, despite the dreaded snagging dragging on for what seems an eternity, will things improve now that tranquility is slowly descending on Brookwood House and I can begin to reclaim my life, and my cerebral territory. I really think they need to, as I am beginning to suspect my naughty children are taking advantage of my diminished mental state and having a little laugh at the tricks they can now play on me. I let them have their fun; it probably comes as a welcome relief from the intense “Mother on a Mission” they grew up with, and I secretly quite like my children reversing roles and taking charge of me now and again. (If only I could go to them with my laundry and requests for loans.)

For whatever reason, my RAM is undoubtedly running low and I wish some brilliant scientist would come up with a way of implanting a few extra Gigabytes into the human brain (surely only a matter of time). I know a lot of ex Superwomen who would be queueing up for it. But in my case it has to be Non-Volatile memory. Apparently Volatile memory requires power to maintain stored information, and as my batteries are also running low at the moment, implants of a different kind might also be required, . . . . but that’s a whole other story.