Our minds are cobwebbed attics, crowded with sad souvenirs, mildewed mementoes, rusty recollection and silverfish'd scrap books. Yet they're our most precious possessions, linking us to our lives. We do not live after death, but, thanks to memory, can live our past life as often as we like. Like re-runs on the telly.
Old marriages, old friendships are bound by memories. They enable us to talk in shorthand to bring up old experiences. Which is why death, divorce, and dementia are so devastating. You lose an old friend and you lose a part of yourself. Pity the middle-aged man who gets divorced and marries a twenty-year-old - whatever else they share, they cannot share memories. With dementia everything seems gone except breathing.
My mind seems to recall less and less of the here and now but it is choc-full of memories going back sixty-five years when I spent all my spare time with the boy scouts, not the dyb-dyb Baden-Powell ones but the homegrown German "Wandervogel" variety with tough long marches, living off the land, and long nights with comrades around a roaring fire.
As it was this weekend when we did some burning-off at "Riverbend".
As I said, my mind recalls less and less of the here and now. But there's one thing I do remember: if I want to forget something immediately, I simply say "I must remember this". Then, whatever it was I wanted to remember, not even the Gestapo could get it out of me under torture.
And there was something else I wanted to tell you. It was something terribly important about ... something. I seem to have forgotten it ...
