What provokes a memory and why? Why do we often remember seemingly insignificant parts of our lives, but conversely not always the bigger events?
There used to be adverts in newspapers (what are they?) in which you could buy books or enroll on courses run by a ‘Memory Man’, which would boost your powers of recollection to levels unattainable by anyone else aside from others who had sent off their cash to him in a bid to halt their mental decline.
I didn’t buy the book, or go on the course, and wouldn’t stoop to the level of saying that was because I forgot.
My memory improved during Covid, when I would walk two miles to work in a morning and the same distance back, and with very few people and little in the way of cars to disturb me, use the time to think.
Often, on completion of the half hour walk (28 minutes six seconds was my fastest) I had one, sometimes two, of my weekly newspaper columns mapped out in my head.
Something would inspire a memory and that would set off a chain of thoughts and related (sometimes unrelated) incidents that may have happened years apart but were, I now realise, connected. Life’s chain is often smashed into pieces, but locate the links and spend some time putting them together and they make sense.
I took the process further when Michael Morrison, the lead character in my novel The Choreography of Ghosts, wrote a whole book – Walks Through Weeping Cities - based on his daily pounding of the streets.
His book wasn’t well received and made him the novelist equivalent of the one-hit wonder, that particular chart-topper being his debut tome The Patron Saint Of Lost Causes.
I felt for Morrison; he had put his heart and soul into that book, laid bare his thoughts, opened himself up to his readers to an extent that many writers never could or would. Perhaps his honesty proved too much in an age in which we barely skim the surface when it comes to sharing our thoughts or attempting to understand those of another without reaching an immediate and ill-considered judgement.
I still do the walking and connecting thing. Only the other day I looked into a house in which an auntie lived 50 years ago, saw someone I hadn’t bumped into in a similar amount of time and within minutes made the link to an 18th birthday party, a trip to the park when I was five-six years old, a number of people I had forgotten existed and a lad who once got his own slot machine for Christmas. I remembered where he lived, connected the street to others, a birthday I once went to, my dad accidentally causing a friend to have a nosebleed, a death of a girl at primary school and surviving my own death wish.
I thought of my favourite shop ever, the people who used to run it, the disappointment or otherwise of scanning the cricket team sheet in the shop window of Hettie Smith’s every week throughout the summer to see if I had or had not been selected, and the first run I ever scored in a ‘competitive’ game.
Most of all, like Michael Morrison on his walks around the street of Bradford, I considered how quickly the time had gone, how much had changed, how much hadn’t, the smell of the freshly cut cricket field and my dad’s ashes below ground, just beyond the boundary, and I remembered the century he scored against Barrowford in 1977, how young he would have been, but did not appear to me, and how myself, and Michael Morrison, are way closer to the exit door than he was, or should have been, on that gorgeous summer’s day.
The thought that I will probably be the last person to remember that innings jolts me. Maybe the details are still available, scrawled by an unknown hand in the 1977 score book that now languishes in a cupboard somewhere, its pages coated in dust, never to be opened again. One page will have the words ‘D Mosley run out 101’ written on it. The other games, for some reason, I don’t recall.