Why can’t I remember anything anymore.
It’s the recent stuff, like the name of the scheme we have deposited money in, it’s the initials that fox me, SSIAS,JNLR,SBI what the hell are they all?
I do remember that my mother was just the same when she was my age.
She insisted to a builder that she needed a JCB to support a wall when we were getting a job done in our house at home. (she meant of course an RSJ)
She also seriously upset a girl in Scott’s paint shop in Mc Curtain St in Cork (does anyone remember Scott’s ? I think it burned down in the fifties) by looking for some Ten, Ten Twenty to clean the carpet.
Ten, Ten Twenty, it turned out is the stuff you use to fertilise the land.
My mother was looking for One Thousand and One
(“Cleans a big big carpet, for less than half a crown”)
There you see, that is the other half of it, I have no trouble in remembering that awful jingle from the very early sixties.
I can remember very little to do with names, or initials from my recent past but cannot be fooled on any piece of irrelevant trivia from my distant past.
The further back the better.

My elder sister arrived back from Italy in the early sixties with various 45’s (do you remember 45’s?) of songs which were brief Italian hits at the time.
I am still word perfect in these songs, and given the correct amount of alcohol, have been known to sing them in Italian Restaurants and even international chef’s conferences to the bewilderment of the listening Italians,
Anyone for “Ora sei remasta sola”, or “Il Pullover” ?
Even the listening Italians can’t remember the words as well as I can.

Another example of my minds unwillingness to lose any random pieces of trivia has to do with plays, operettas and musicals.

I suppose the musicals should come first.
My parents used to enjoy musicals and make occasional forays to London to see them.
They inevitably came back with the 33 inch long playing record (Remember those?)
This leaves me fairly well word perfect to this day in Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Pyjama Game, South Pacific, Irma La Douce to name but a few.

This is an illness that has afflicted all of my family members.
All one has to do is hum a few bars from the overture of My Fair Lady(for instance) and the seven Dwyer siblings won’t rest until they have bellowed their tuneless way through all of the numbers in the show, to the profound embarrassment of their spouses, and the total terror of anybody else present.

Operettas, particularly Gilbert and Sullivan ones have a similar effect on me. I can rattle my way through most of the patter songs (some of which haven’t dated very well) and can even sing a lot of the female solos, this a relic of the days when by unbroken voice was required to give an imitation of these in the hall of Christian Brothers College in Cork in the Sixties.

The plays bit is rather more useful.
I spent a great number of years in the Loft, the Cork Shakespearian Society. While there I must have been involved in the production of at least a dozen of the bards plays.
Most of these I can still stumble through.
(When one has heard something rehearsed incessantly for a six month period it does tend to sink in well)
This was the most useful one.
I was able always to quote great gobbets of Shakespeare at will since those days.
I have no doubt that this was the single most important thing that helped me to scrape a BA in English many years later.

But all these great store houses of knowledge, this hard drive of information are just as about useless in my present life as an intimate knowledge of the “W” section of a 1958 phone book would be.
My wife who, unlike me can remember things in the recent past, despairs of me forgetting names and numbers (don’t even start me on passwords)
Mind you I am better at remembering than her when we go back a few years.
I sometimes cheer myself up by pretending that this is a medical condition. About 15 years ago I had a brain Haemorrhage and as a consequence lost completely and totally about two months of my life.
Apparently during this time I was behaving much as I always did, I just can’t remember it.
Then I remember my mother and her total inability and indeed unwillingness to get to terms with names, and I realise that it is hereditary.
She was most intolerant of car indicators for instance and always called them doo-dahs. Up to my early twenties as a consequence, I thought that doo-dah was the correct technical term for these.
I’m fairly like that myself, if the name doesn’t come immediately I will go for a handy one that might have the same initial, or rhyme or something.
It is laziness really.
I always subscribe to the notion that as we get older we don’t want to bother to remember any new bits of information unless we think them of huge importance.
I am reminded of Marilyn Monroe’s bon mot when she said “I can never remember a new phone number without forgetting an old one”

By the time we are into our fifties and the brain cells have, they tell us, been in decline since the age of 23 (when they peaked) we obviously have no further room for storage without clearing out loads of old rubbish.
I recently took my camera for a seven week holiday.
The memory thingy has room for about 500 pictures which I soon used up.
Then I had to start deleting.
This worked for a while until I realised that I was starting to delete stuff I wanted to keep.
Then a technological friend helped out and let me download my photos on to a CD.
This was brilliant,and this of course is my solution.

I propose that some whizz kid out there set up some simple mechanism where all my useless trivia banks can be downloaded on to CDs.
These I can leave in a cupboard somewhere and haul out only when the occasions demand.
(On Italian holidays for instance, or going to the light Opera festival in Waterford, or a trip to Stratford on Avon)
On these rare occasions we can get a quick trivia recharge.
This should clear plenty of space for new acquaintances and computer terms, acronyms, and other modern trivia.

I’m not convinced though.
I might just rather keep the Shakespeare.