Liadnan

A comments exchange with Frankie the other day had me thinking about the odd tricks my memory plays. The thing is, I have, in several regards, an exceptionally good memory, which is an incredibly useful gift in my line of work, and was also fairly handy when I purported to be a historian: the ability to remember in the middle of XExam where in twenty files a particular document is to be found -or even that it exists- or to keep in your head the details of an exceedingly complicated trust and corporation structure is not to be underestimated.

Like most such gifts, it has some appalling bugs. It works best with words and sounds: I can remember whole screeds of text, place obscure quotations from things I haven't read in years (which is why I become enormously irritated when I can't) and remember exactly how people sound. One odd failing is that I have serious difficulty remembering people's names until I'm familiar with the person involved - I learnt the embarrassing way to write down names on a piece of paper when in court and eventually ended up consciously working on memory tricks to cover it. Even with people I know well, names can occasionally go astray or, (as was the point in the original comments thread) become attached to the wrong people, particularly if there's some connexion in my head between the "wrong" and "right" people concerned.

Even worse is that my visual memory is completely buggered. It's a real struggle for me to call up mental pictures, even those of things and scenes I see every day (how this works with the fact I also have a very good sense of direction, which I would assume is something to do with subconscious assimilation and interpretation of what I see, is not entirely clear to me). And at the extreme end of this, I am almost completely unable to visualise faces. To give some idea of the extent of this, I cannot visualise my mother's face. I can visualise that of my father and one of my sisters, the sister who largely looked after me when I was an infant, but not my brother or my other sister. Most other people, with a very few notable exceptions - almost hopeless. (I have no problem with recognising anything or anyone when I see them, it's imagining them when I don't that's the problem.)

Except, except, for a trick that puts the lie to this: I can call to mind photographs with which I'm familiar, eg the photos of my close friends usually to be found on my wall. So I can't recall what people looked like the last time I saw them - but I can call up a memory of a photo of them. (Which means that memories of most of my friends involve backdrops of various Oxford and London pubs)

Is this bizarre? (Is dr_d in the house?).

I also discovered on Friday that I can't actually remember what I did for my 21st birthday. I have my suspicions about the reasons for this, but it's nonetheless rather sad, not to mention bloody irritating, as a consequence of generally having a decent memory is absolute fury when it fails, so James, Stephen, Matt, Ruth, Lyd, Marie: you were all there and occasionally pass by here, do enlighten me if you can remember.

In other news I have had a day fuelled by such righteous ire and indignation at all concerned, on all sides, in certain pieces of litigation that I'm not sure I should be allowed to go and poke an epee at people in anger now. I'm going to do it anyway though: I think it's precisely what I need.

Lack of internet availability at home (which continues but may be sorted fairly soon) was the main cause of my hiatus, but I'm also going through a phase of feeling I don't have anything to write about. These six months stuck out in the Channel are something of a hiatus in my life generally, and that seems to be carrying over to here.

I don't mind it here most of the time, and there are some real benefits (I think I may hop over to St Malo this weekend), though most of them involve being outside and the weather stinks at the moment. I know now that I did choose the right side of the English legal profession for me though: being a solicitor is really not my forte.

And I've run out of books again, having finished A Feast for Crows in one sitting and also run out of Frankie's care package. Well, almost: I've returned to a re-read of The Once and Future King that I put to one side in August.

I seem to be watching almost no television at all: for the last three weeks it's only been Midsomer Murders and now Jericho (which I find tolerable but not that gripping) on a Sunday evening.

Spent Saturday wandering around Elizabeth Castle in light drizzle (accessible only by boat or, more usually, ex-army Duck at high tide: Jersey has one of the most ridiculously huge tidal flows in the world and imbeciles who don't know what they are doing often find themselves caught, on one notorious relatively recent occasion with horses, which they managed to persuade up a Martello tower). The castle is huge, mostly commissioned when Raleigh was governor (though it incorporates St Helier's alleged early medieval hermitage) but pretty much continuing in use and development up to and during the occupation. The Germans built it into their own ring of massive island fortifications, so you have the vaguely incongruous sight of a seventeenth century gateway next to a searchlight bunker, with sheep grazing on top. Actually this happened all over the island: the Napoleonic-era Martello towers and the medieval castle at Gorey were all re-fortified I think.

Ho hum. Not dead yet, just resting.

ETA: Anne Rice finds God. We will all now pause for boggling. (Link via Katy.)

And while I'm doing links: new Robin Hood. One hopes the last line is a joke. I'm not entirely clear whether "The series will follow ITV's hit 1980s series Robin of Sherwood" (all pause to hum "The Hooded Man") means it will specifically refer back to that (I have a feeling the rights are tied up in an insolvency somehow) or something more general.

There's a curious sense of freedom I had almost forgotten, which comes from the realisation that all your stuff is safe, over there (my office in this case) and from now on you're living from a suitcase and a rucksack (both weighed down with books, obvs). Almost like going backpacking again. Except this time I'm not trying to make my way round Europe on a small overdraft facility.

Just as Cairo Martyr did. (Many points to anyone who recognises the reference without googling.)

I've been vaguely toying with a post about free will, determinism, and seizing the day for a while now, on and off, but it always came out incoherent and, frankly, pretentious bollocks. I meant to write about how I become genuinely angry when people (such as my mother) take horoscopes or the prophecies of Nostradamus or the general idea of a knowable pre-determined fate even semi-seriously, and then vaguely wander via theology and my really very superficial grasp of quantum physics (if one allows for the sake of argument the existence of an omnipresent and omniscient god, who is both within the universe and time and yet not constrained by it, and who is therefore there at all times observing within Schrodinger's box, what does that do to the whole sort of general mishmash, and can we stop Dan Simmmons writing another science fiction novel about it before I do?) to the way I gamble with my life.

The Onion Horoscope always seems far more accurate and applicable to my life and the way I feel than any "real" one. Seriously

Libra: You will be unable to shake a deep feeling of unutterable sadness as you roam the world with a scruffy band of misfits at the end of history, performing the occasional execution in your search for your lost mother/lover and a way to rekindle the dying sun

Just call me Severian.

Actually, that isn't remotely true. I own one Now album*, 12 or 13 I think (it isn't in London, all I remember about it is that it has Hey Hey Matthew on it and is a cassette). Coffee spoons, or at least coffee measures, have actually been a far more important marker.

Nevertheless, the regular phenomenon of noticing a new Now album in the supermarket and thinking "Now 569! What the fuck happened to my life?" is depressingly familiar. It doesn't help that right at the moment I have had it up to the putative top of the London Bridge Shard of Glass (to be the tallest building in Europe if and when completed, and a more appropriate metaphor than might at first appear) with my life and want to be here instead.

No, not right now, obvs. Even Mediterranean beaches aren't particularly pleasant in late November, particularly not at 9PM. Still, I'm sure you take the point.

Perhaps Duke Humphrey's Library would be a more appropriate home from home for the time of year. Or not, as the case may be. A friend of mine was once nearly killed by a lump of wood falling from the roof in there, incidentally. There he was, looking at Anglo-Saxon charters when a bloody great chunk of beam crashed into the desk beside him. On closer examination it transpired that the efforts several years before, at great expense, to preserve the roof from death watch beetle (or whatever) had been, err, rubbish and the place had to close down for a year.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, unless it's a work-avoidance measure. That would seem plausible, yes.

*ETA: I'm not sure if this requires explanation for non-UK readers. Now That's What I Call Music is a semi-annual# compilation of the "best" of the British charts.

#Semi-annual? Well, biannual isn't right, that means every two years, no? Half yearly, anyway.

I've just discovered that Patrick Wormald died recently. I feel rather sad: I knew him well enough to say hello and chat for a bit at drinks after seminars and similar when I was in my third year and then at Oxford. One of the best Anglo-Saxon historians of his day, and a genuinely interesting and friendly guy, at least when sober.

I remember him chain smoking throughout a seminar once, much to the chair's despair. I also remember seeing him drink... which was sad -as most who knew him were well aware, he was a heavy-duty alcoholic. His work was, even with that burden, an impressive body, despite the fact he was only 57 when he died.

(In which I pontificate pretentiously)

I went home for the weekend, as I hadn't seen my parents for a while and won't be free for a longer while of weekends.

Since my father had a minor stroke some years ago now, his health has progressively degenerated. He takes a vast cocktail of prescribed medicines, one side effect of which has been to make him extremely emotional. We've got used, over the last couple of years, to him bursting into tears when something said in dinnertime conversation, or on the radio makes him feel this way.

I've just returned from the wilds of Hampshire, where it was Really Cold incidentally, and seeing my parents plus Sister2 and sprog. Good weekend, but parents.. really. Why does it take my mother, having already asked whether I'm coming to mass and received the answer from the depths of my duvet of a firm "no", ten minutes to tell me that they now usually leave at 9.30, that is, in ten minutes, and then to ask me to turn on the oven, light the fire, and buy the usual papers before they return? I'm not exaggerating, I had one eye on the clock. K. claims that I am long-winded, but I maintain that this is utterly different, I merely have a lawyer's attention to detail and a historian's concern for context. Anyway, when we were together it was always a cause of concern to me that she and my mother agreed in all details on the manifold ways I was running my life badly.

Dad's no better. I have a specific and pessimistic reason for trying to go down every six weeks or so. It depresses me more than I can express to see the way the man who taught me to read, criticise, think, and appreciate art in all forms has been reduced. For which reason I shall say nothing more about it.

Oh, I suppose I could watch a documentary about drunk driving, a documentary about Rwanda, or Demolition Man but I think I'll pass on all of those right now, thanks. Since I can't find anythiing I particularly want to read lying around, (and yes, I know I'm behind with my mini-reviews, but "Ive got it writted down on a piece of paper") I'll stick with the Best Ofs... pop stars by singles sales, presented by Smashy and Nicey. And this rather good bottle of whisky.