Senior Moments

It’s only eight o’clock and my day’s already off to a poor start. I left my lunch on the kitchen bench and went back to get it, luckily spotting my laptop on the floor, only to realise halfway to work my lunch was still at home.

My career as a marketer for large corporates demanded project management skills to the enth degree. Forget one thing and the whole muesli bar launch is impacted. As well as remembering my own job, I had to remember everyone else’s job too. From hassling R&D for the trial samples to hounding the packaging manager to make the printing deadline for delivery to the factory, there was no end to the stuff we brand managers had to remember. Smart technology wasn’t around then, but I suspect its influential role in making us all work twenty-four/seven negates its assistance these days.

Throw in twenty years of raising babies and project managing their lives - homework, book week costumes, Harmony Day (NO-ONE HAS ORANGE CLOTHING), lifts to and from sport, birthday parties - plus management of the Family Unit (lunches, grandparents’ birthdays, holidays, any and all social engagements) and it’s a miracle my brain’s still functioning.

That said, now I’m on the other side of career and child raising milestones I’m nervous. Is my day-to-day reduced brainpower contributing to declining faculties? Or does making stuff up (as a fiction writer) plug the gap sufficiently?

I decide to conduct some robust qualitative research and ask my sisters in the UK to share similar anecdotes. One of them holidays each year in the same spot in Spain where rubbish and recyclables go in communal bins at the end of the road. They routinely arrive at the airport and have to squeeze a week’s worth of household rubbish into the airport bins.

From driving around all week with a letter due for posting sitting on the passenger seat to wearing odd coloured (and heel height) shoes, the tales came thick and fast. I learned of the time my parents got home from a summer picnic with friends, only to realise they’d left the baby (my sister) behind. It was 1959 and baby contraptions the size of spaceships were a thing of the future, so in fairness she was probably hard to spot.

Undeterred by my straw poll, I’m thrilled to uncover research by a German psychologist that suggests forgetting is necessary to manage the Tetris storage cabinet in your brain. We’re constantly bombarded with information, so we subconsciously let the small stuff go. At the same time, we need to find a place to store new information. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, our ancestors had to learn pretty quickly to try a new watering hole if a bear made camp at the old one.

But the good news is, it’s all in there somewhere, you just have to rummage hard. The Tip of the Tongue phenomenon we all experience (an actual named phenomenon) signals the information is not forgotten, only currently inaccessible. Think of your brain as a burgeoning Rolodex requiring more and more sifting. I guess it’s a bit like my local coffee shop which has an alphabetised box of loyalty cards for regulars. I’ve lost count of the number of times my card, stored under ‘L’, has disappeared. The only effective workaround is to jam it somewhere it’s not supposed to go (such as ‘Z’), the equivalent of putting your car keys in the fridge at work along with your groceries.

Then there are those irritating nagging feelings where you think you’ve forgotten something (locking the door, turning off the iron) which allow you no peace until you’ve gone and double checked. (Let me guess – you hadn’t forgotten, right?)

I’m not sure this explains why I can still remember the name of the boy in year six who pulled my hair and told tales (Adrian Gough) while my lovingly prepared lunch was left at home approximately five minutes after packing it - twice. My friend Jen tells me I need to ‘delete my hard drive’ because of the abundance of completely useless facts I seem to store in my head but maybe they just need shaking up, like the letters in Boggle.

Time to shoulder these useless nuggets aside to make room for more memories. And if all else fails, I’ll start tying my car keys to my lunch.