Lent

My nephew gave up chocolate for Lent last year. In fact, my memory tag for 28 March 2012 is sitting in the café at an astronomy centre we were visiting, where he suddenly remembered the hot chocolate drink he had ordered would break his promise. So I had it instead and he had some ginger beer.

My wife isn't Catholic, but her evangelical church is having a 40-days fast until Easter. One of the suggestions was to give up milk. That's my memory tag for 17 February 2013, the Church service when they ran through the suggestions: red meat, solid food (sounds a little dangerous), watching sport for men - using makeup for women (a bit sexist in this day and age), sugar, desserts, coffee, milk.

I drink a lot of milk and so thought it might be interesting to give it a miss for 40 days. Just over a week later, I can say I don't seem to have any form of lactose intolerance as I feel no different for not having milk in my drinks and avoiding icecream and cheese. Which makes the thought of going back to it even more appealing.

This week

The counter on this page tells me there are 437 days since I began this process of remembering every day that passes on 17 December 2011.

So far, so good. I haven't lost a day. Though some are harder to remember than others.

The hardest days to remember, I repeatedly find, are those in the past week or two.

The images I have just pinned to my mental calendar are not entrenched.

At odd moments, I will run through the current week to refresh my memory as to what I had selected. Sometimes it seems another image might be more appropriate, perhaps because it links with surrounding images: having a theme for the week is a short cut to remembering I sometimes use.

As I go to sleep I run through the past month. It is sometimes a relief when particular days move outside this window after recalling the memory tag night after night. Once the month-long stint is over, I have little problem recalling any day since I began when I choose to.

Often I find it is a bigger challenge to remember what I did yesterday than on this day a year ago.

Swimming lengths

I have been getting back into swimming - partly because a minor strain was limiting my running.

I usually do some sort of review of the images pinned to my internal calendar for remembering every day that passes while on a run and tried the same thing while swimming.

The trouble I found was that I also count the lengths I swim and it was easy to confuse the date I was remembering and the number of the length I was swimming.

The solution was obvious: combine the two.

Which gives a fun exercise while exercising.

Length 1: recall the images for the 1st of each month going back in time, till the length is over.

Length 2: repeat for the 2nd of each month.

Hitting 30 lengths, then start again from the 1st, but for earlier months.

A variation I am using sometimes is to only retrieve one image for the day of a particular month corresponding to the number of the length I am swimming and use that as a jumping off point to remember as much as possible about the day before the next length.

Other times, I just concentrate on improving my swimming style and practise tumble turns.

Pouring down

When I was a kid an expression I sometimes heard from my mother was, "It never rains, but it pours."

Meaning sometimes one thing after another goes wrong or causes hassle.

That was my week. From work stress, to car trouble, to an absurdly high utility bill, to pulling a muscle running. And that was just Thursday. It's enough to be going on with. It poured.

I found my review of the memory tags I use to remember the past 14 months helped put things in perspective.

Currently I pass a two-day window over the weeks since I began this process, so I was recalling every Saturday and Sunday since the end of 2011.

I guess if I plotted a graph of stress against time as I did the review it would have been jumping up and down, but the central message was these days will be past memories before too long.

A subsidiary message was problems can usually be resolved, just take them one by one.

The underlying message was life is a journey and I should do my best to enjoy it. 

Even when it pours.

Just last year

For about the past 14 months (until 17 December 2011), I have images pinned to my mental calendar that enable me to remember each one of the days from then to now.

Now I am filling in the preceding years retrospectively and this is changing the way I perceive the images from a year ago. I caught myself thinking today, "That was just last year", as if remembering something a year ago is no big deal, no longer an effort. Almost as natural as remembering what I had for breakfast.

In this case the image pinned to my mental calendar for a year ago is the birth of my best friend's daughter (not literally the birth - our receiving the phone call from my friend), so not so unusual.

But the same is true for each and every day where the images are firmly entrenched on my mental calendar. I certainly couldn't do that before I made this conscious effort to remember.

I feel this is a good sign because it may indicate that my brain is starting to adjust to remembering things a year or so ago as if this is the recent past.

I am still doing my daily reviews of a two-day window for each week since I began this process, but maybe this method will start to change, though I am not sure yet how.

How could I forget?

I am filling in the blanks on my mental calendar, with a focus on 2009 - 2011, as well as continuing with the process of remembering every day that passes going forward.

This is starting to bear real fruit.

As we split our time between my wife's country and my own, each year can have a different flavour, particularly as our circumstances change.

In 2010, for example, we spent some of the year staying with my parents. I know now that we actually left my wife's country on this date - 9 February - three years ago as I've recently gone through the stamps in my passport to apply for renewing my residence visa.

Remembering the date, I remembered it was cold. Then I remembered that soon after arriving we had taken advantage of a hotel promotion to stay in a hotel in the countryside an hour or so away.

Remembering that reminded me that we had hired a holiday cottage in the same area for a weekend break in the summer to meet up with some friends we hadn't seen for a while. Then it struck me: we had arrived at the cottage on my birthday.

So now I have an image pinned to my mental caledar for my birthday in 2010.

This had eluded me when I tried to think back to where I had been on past birthdays, even though it was less than three years ago.

Now I know, and hopefully will not forget again.

Remembering past centuries

My morning review involved running a Thursday/Friday window over every week of my internal calendar since I began this process of remembering every day that passes.

And so I remembered that on 13 January 2012 my wife and I visited an art gallery. It was hosting a touring exhibition of Dutch masters and was shortly to close so I left work for an early lunch and we joined the queue.

Visiting the gallery is my memory tag. Mentally standing on this image pinned to Friday 13 January, I looked down at my feet and decided to enter the image to relive the day.

There is one particular moment that is especially vivid as I recall shuffling past the pictures in the crowded room. A portrait of a lady with a white silk dress, sitting, with the skirts ballooning around her as was the style when it was painted, over three hundred years ago.

In the huddle around the picture, everyone leans in and I am captivated by the sheen on the dress. The picture is about the size of an A4 sheet, but it seems the texture of the material has been captured with a brush that is too fine to exist.

Standing up, I am transported back to my bed in the early morning of 8 February 2013, the sun not yet risen.

I think of the skill shown by the artist and the years it must have taken to develop the skills required. Then it hits me. When it was painted there was no photography, no way to capture an image from the light it reflects, other than through the medium of the artist's skill. No wonder those who could put down a likeness that breathed reality were so highly valued - even if poorly paid.

The years of dedication it took to reach that level of ability was a worthwhile investment, because it gave the artist a trade. Having a portrait drawn, or painted if one had the money, must have been such a special occassion. Something magical.

With the onset of photography realism became less important than interpretation and today most of us have many more photos than we can be bothered to put onto paper and frame, or even look at. In this digital age I wonder how soon the period of a century and a half when images were captured by the chemical marvel that was photographic film will be forgotten.

Before that innovation human beings relied on artists and the pictures we have of past times are thanks to them, from the matchstick figures on the cave walls to the finest silk dress.

Passport control

I need to renew my residence visa to stay in my wife's country and for the application form I have to indicate the time I spent out of the country during the past ten years.

Walking back from the visa office, I started going through the dates I could remember. I knew the month I had come here to get married in 2001 and when we left to stay in my country 18 months later.

Thinking of where we first lived, I remembered sending Christmas cards to our neighbours having returned to my wife's country for a few weeks in December 2003. Vaguely I remembered leaving for extended visits to my wife's country in 2005 and 2006, which brings me to the time I have started to reconstruct on my mental calendar working backwards from the current time.

But it was all too vague for the declaration I need to submit.

So I have gone through my old passport and noted down the dates of all the entry and exit stamps. From this I know exactly when I was where.

There are trips I cannot really remember making. I knew my wife had gone home to see her family for a few weeks before her first Christmas away. I remember saying goodbye at the airport back in 2002. But I had forgotten I joined her a few weeks later.

The passport stamps give me some firm dates to pin to my mental calendar. How and when this will happen, I'm not sure, but it is interesting to have the true shape of the time we have spent in our different countries.

What day is it?

As I embark on finding memory tags for the months on my mental calendar for the time before I began this process of remembering every day that passes, I am finding the exercise is bringing many events to mind.

So much so, I am now trying to think more about the days of the months for the years of 2010 and 2011, which are my main focus at the present time.

Practically, I do my normal review of the days since I began this process on 17 December 2011 as I wake up. Then if I have mental time free during the day - usually when I go for a run - I think back to the same day of the month for as far as I can go. The past 14 months is easy as I have memory tags for each day. Beyond that, I'm just lucky if one of the images I've found for the month falls on the right date.

To help orientate myself I am working out the day of the week for the date. Having an actual mental image of the calendar helps. For example, I know today 5 February 2013 is Tuesday.

In my mind's eye, the sheets for each month stretch out in front of the year 2013 in large flaming numbers.

I can step to my left from the date to the same date last year and, as if a drum rotates, 2012 comes up in front of me. When my mental foot lands on 5 February 2012, I know it was a Sunday, both because I can remember the day (we visited an industrial museum) and because it is two days earlier than this year as 2012 was a leap year.

Making another step, I know 5 February 2011 was a Saturday, on the basis it was not a leap year. Similarly, 5 February 2010 was a Friday.

I'm also becoming more adept and working out the days in doing a straight run back. I can get to 5 January 2012 as I remember the same date in each month (it was the day I took my wife to sign up to a college course - and a Thursday). Back a month and 5 December 2011 is before I began this process. However, I know that 31 days before a Thursday would have been a Monday.

I actually have an image for 6 December 2011 - it was the day I attended a course - and, sure enough, that was a Tuesday. Things start to slot into place.

I have found images for other days in the same week, but I'm not too bothered if there are blanks, but it is both satisfying and helpful when I can anchor an image to the correct date.

Waiting to be remembered

As I continue this process of remembering every day that passes into its second year, I am also trying to recover past days by finding images to pin to the months on my mental calendar prior to beginning this process.

At present, I'm giving most attention to 2010 and 2011, though occasionally run back as far as I can go.

Having started with the target of just one image per month and not worrying about the particular day it belongs to, I'm finding the exercise is unlocking many more memories.

I had forgotten the soccer World Cup took place in 2010 and now have a memory tag of watching one of the games. I've also remembered details of my wife's and my own birthdays in those years that had escaped me. Each recollection helps to orientate me and, as I start to include them in my reviews they bring up other events.

Memory research suggests it does not function like a video tape or hard drive store, but it does seem that I have a lot stored away just waiting to be remembered.