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Do you remember? John Nash is a retired, well sort of retired, fruit farm manager in Kirdford who enjoys scribbling about life on the farm from the now to days gone by. I was just wondering if any of you good folk suffer from problems of that most irrational of human functions… memory. Over the last few years, with the fact that we are lasting so much longer than our ancestors managed, we are becoming only too aware of the problems that can arise from our memories’ more erratic behaviour. Sadly, some fall into the horrors of dementia and total memory loss. This is not the path I want to travel down here. I just want to look at the way the memory can play tricks… can tease… can aggravate... can be just plain bloody minded! With the events of the past year, I, like I imagine many of you who are of the grey generation, have had so much more time to kill. I sit staring at that flickering box, trying to make sense of the doom and gloom that is so much part of journalism in modern times. I try to read a newspaper, but that just echoes the opinions of the newsreader on the tele… so I give up. I flick through the pages to the crossword. Ahh! At last something that gets me thinking. I glance at the clues. Simple! They seem quite easy. Then with pen poised I set to. Bugger! I know the answer to that. It’s… it’s on the tip of my tongue. Oh come on! Of course I know it. Damn it… it’s only got five letters. And so it continues. Words of ten letters fly from the pen, while short, pithy little posers sit
unanswered and refuse to emerge from the fog that swirls inside my head. But why? I’m aware that my short-term memory has deteriorated to the level that I can go upstairs to retrieve something and then stand vacant of useful thought as I stare bemused at the bedroom door. Or, I can visit the village shop and return with everything but that which I went there for in the first place. I had a list – of course I did – but, I forgot it. We’ve all done it, haven’t we? Go on, admit it… you have! There again I’m proud of the fact that when the bank requested that my password number should extend to seven digits I instantly recalled my gran’s Co Op number from over 60 years ago. At school in my preEleven Plus years we had the register called by us boys shouting out our names in alphabetical order. It stuck. Now, 70 years on I can repeat every boys name in that class, all 40 of them! Their faces refuse to appear, but their names will be with me forever. So goes the workings of this wonder called memory. It brings us silent laughter and remembered tears. Joys of past friendship and the pain of great loss. Most of all ,though, as we age, it frustrates us, taunts us and dares us to try and understand it. Never mind. Why worry? Tomorrow we will have forgotten anyway! Now… three down: six letters… ‘Who was the jester in Hamlet?’ Ahh! Just a minute… don’t tell me… I know this… darn it… I know him so well! John Nash
Damn… it’s on the tip of my tongue…
FLAT ROOFS / UPVC FACIAS SOFFITS / GUTTERING MISSING TILES CHIMNEYS / LEADWORK www.bestchoiceroofing.co.uk 01403 390040 or 07961410377 marc@bestchoiceroofing.co.uk
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