Drawing a blank

Too much wine, not enough sleep.

That's what I blame for the unpleasant feeling of drawing blanks yesterday for several days in the review of the memory tags on my internal calendar.

Those older than a month now seem to be firmly entrenched. It was more recent tags that gave me a problem, even those for last week.

At times like this, I remind myself that it will great feeling when they come back and not to worry about it.

I also told myself it was probably down to having a glass or two of wine for too many consecutive nights while working late and missing out on sleep. I was tired.

All the techniques for remembering came into play and the missing four or five images were recaptured.

With a couple it was an echo that finally helped the missing tags come back.

I went to sleep still drawing a blank for the image for 13 February. This morning it was still blank. I could remember the surrounding days and remembered some of the things I had done on that day, but not the specific image I had chosen to mark it out.

It was only when picking up a Charles Dickens book to read with my wife that it came back to me. It had been a while since we had read the book. With that thought I remembered that on 13 February I picked up my guitar for over a year (I had only recently collected it after we moved back here to my country).

It felt great to remember and I mentally embossed the date onto the neck of the guitar.

Nearly three months into this process of remembering and I've not yet had to give up on any day.

It felt close this time, but hopefully that was just down to the wine and lack of sleep.