Catherine’s blog – day fourteen

Saturday 13th August 2011

And so the weekend rolls on again; inexorable isn’t it.  The weeks seem to go so fast that I have great difficulty in even remembering what I did last week, let alone things that happened a month or a year ago. And then all of a sudden a memory, a little gem pops up fully formed into the mind.  Something you thought you had forgotten entirely is there, crystal clear and bright.  A day on the beach maybe, or part of a conversation; which infuriatingly you cannot quite place in time or space. A bit like those muddled up dreams that the scientists tell us (somewhat unbelievably) are not the dreams we have been dreaming all night, simply the ones when our mind was surfacing, as sleep was breaking us into wakefulness.  You know, the infuriating repetitious ones where the same silly things are happening, but in some sort of slow-mode style and not quite recognisable.  The structure and the actions are all too obviously correct, but the people populating them are all wrong, mixing up people you used to know years ago with places you visited for the first time only a few weeks ago.  One part of your mind knows it is completely irrational, impossible even, and yet it is so clear and bright and maybe the repetition of the thing makes it, for a few seconds, utterly believable.  Well, my memories are often like that. I know that something happened, I can almost taste it, but I cannot quite place the time and location.  But when I start to write it down then it begins to make sense, as if the very act of writing is an aide-memoire.  And so I am writing more than ever these days; just unlinked little memories mostly. And yes, maybe I will share some with you sometime; we’ll see.