Remembering backwards

My daily reviews of a portion of the tags on my mental calendar now stretches back two years, prior to the time I began this process of remembering every day that passes on 17 December 2011.

I recall two days per week by reviewing the images I have pinned to those days. If they exist. Which is rare until I hit the magic date. From then on, I have images for every day.

While I have come up with images for some key dates in the mainly blank months - such as weddings, travel, birthdays - generally I have to make do with registering the date for the days of the week I am reviewing and recalling something significant for the month as a whole to at least have some idea of where I was and what was going on in my life.

I am finding some value in doing this, but it markedly different from the richness when my calendar is fully populated.

But there seems little point in trying to fill in all of the blanks.

Here's why.

Today is 31 May and a year ago I know I visited a shopping mall to meet up with a friend. I have an memory tag for the day. An image may be quite inconsequential - sitting with my friend at the mall - but it contains a great deal of information, fixing the day in time and place.

The year before, 31 May 2011, was a Tuesday. I know I was in my wife's country and we were probably staying in our flat at the time, though I cannot be certain.

Perhaps if I trawled through credit card records I could work out we had visited a particular café, which I might remember and might be able to turn that into a memory tag.

It may be defeatist, but I feel it is not worth that effort. It's not the tags that are important, but how they orientate me.

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.

Where did the money go?

We had a relative and her friend visit from my wife's country and were showing them around, including some of the sights in the capital.

They gave me some money for their hotel room, which I paid for on my credit card so as to have the cash.

By the next day most of it had gone and that night I had the horrible thought that I had left some of the money in the envelope, which I had discarded without double checking.

However, I thought if I am able to remember each of the past 218 days since I began this process, then surely I could remember the every time I had spent money over the past two days and add it up.

And so it proved.

Which left me feeling like the guy who runs into a pub and rushes over to the landlady.

"Did I come in here yesterday, get drunk and then offer to buy drinks for everyone until the 500 bucks I'd just been paid had run out?"

"Yes, you did," replied the landlady, with a fond smile at the business.

"Thank goodness," he replied. "I thought I'd lost it."

Funny words

When I caught the wrong bus on Wednesday 7 March, I was intending to get off at the cemetery stop.

This prompted remembrance of childhood fascination with words. Why did we bury people at a semi-tree?

And why were people called human beans? Were they related to baked beans?

I still have to think before saying the word "gesture". As a joke my father used to pronounce it with a hard g. How was I to know that was wrong?

I read avidly as a child and would sometimes bleep over words I didn't understand, knowing I would start to see them everywhere and would work them out from context. Or eventually I'd reach for the dictionary if it was too much of a distraction.

It meant sometimes I knew a word, but not the correct pronunciation, which could last for many years.

The director of a play I appeared in about 12 years ago complemented me on my first rendition of the speech that was to open the play, but had to tell me where to put the stress on "plethora".

There is a word that continues to sound strange to me. Whenever I say it I feel I must have swapped the consonants over, even when I haven't: car park.