I have just been watching a programme on the television called Unknown White Male about a young English man who was found on the subway in New York having completely lost his memory.
Two years later, having been reunited with his life, his family and friends it still hasn’t come back.
People keep telling him it will.
Others frankly think he is faking it.
This ironically brings back strong memories to me.
Memories that there is still about three weeks of my life that I cannot remember.

In 1991, on 12th March (a date easy to remember, it was the day before my birthday), I had a brain haemorrhage, or more correctly as they never found traces of the bleed, an aneurysm on the brain.
After suffering some hours of very intense headache I “came to” again to find myself in intensive-care in the university hospital in Cork.
It was a week later.
Then I made what appeared to everyone to be a remarkable recovery.
I went back to work in the restaurant which I owned.
I cooked, so they tell me, as well as ever.
We closed the restaurant for a week and went for a holiday to my brothers new house in West Cork.
I remember none of any of this.
Other than that moment when I left the hospital I came gradually back to normal memory about three weeks later.
Not suddenly with a jerk but gradually over some weeks.
When I say I can remember nothing of those three weeks there is one thing I can.
For some silly reason I can remember quite clearly a trip we took to Bantry House, and a visit, I think on the same day, to the Hotel in Barley Cove where I had worked as a student.
All the rest is wiped out, a year later I returned to my brothers house, hoping that the sight of it would somehow remind me of it but no, absolutely nothing.
It must now be all well gone, and, what does it matter?
I no longer even care whether I will remember it or not.

I think I came out of the whole episode much the same person as I was before, I have a certain intolerance to non-fiction which is gradually diminishing with old age but there is no other change which either I or my family can pinpoint.
Now its rather fun to remember that I cannot remember.