Memory and Forgetting.

I was reading about memory - the theories and metaphors - how one can help the other. I was learning about how people forget and people remember - going from one complicated model to the next, totally engrossed - when the phone went.

How must it be to lose your mind? As she spoke it seemed I could hear it unravelling - one plausible confusion leading to another which was much less plausible.

'I thought it was Sunday. I thought it was still four o'clock. Why are you going out? Who is with me now?'

Then the irritation and the anger: 'I should know. Why don't I know? Why can't I remember?'

How often this happens - that the pages in the book seem to come to life. I had just been reading about how neurons degenerate; about how forgetting could be images being overwritten or wearing out: the different theories, models, experiments and machines.

But this is real. All at once I am pulled into the life of someone I know and love and am offering advice and remembering another time - remembering so well that soon I am too choked up to speak at all.

Memory is a dog that won't lie down they say in the Netherlands. It wanders around where it will - untamed and sometimes biting at my heels.