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.

Remembering bus routes

I dropped the car at the garage yesterday for its annual service and caught the bus home.

I took the bus at the shopping and cinema complex we sometimes visit in town.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that although the bus passes by the stop at the end of our road, it sails on by as it is the link bus to the out-of-town car park.

I had a long walk in the rain to reflect on why this vital fact had slipped my mind.

My memory tag for the day includes this walk so I remember not to take that bus again - particularly when I'm with my wife.

Hopefully remembering the experience will be more effective than remembering the map of bus route.

Dying every day

If we are the sum of our experiences, then the person I am now is different to the person I was yesterday.

I can look back, day by day, to when I began this process of remembering, like a clock winding backwards.

Further back, the dates are more likely to be blank than filled with memories.

But I see myself growing younger, becoming a child. My loved ones rejuvenating.

Those days are gone. Those people changed.

Every day I die and become a new person in adding a layer of experience.

Older and, if I learn from my mistakes, perhaps wiser.

My parents

My parents visited for the weekend. My father is 79 years old and drove the 180 miles to see us. He is very active, despite still suffering from injuries sustained as a child in the second world war. He is a writer and has embraced computers in recent years, which is particularly impressive given he does not use them intuitively but writes detailed notes for every procedure.

My mother is 72 and not as active as she used to be. Since we last saw her, she has taken to pushing a shopping trolley everywhere for support due to arthritis in her knees. She doses herself with pills and cider vinegar that are supposed to help, and gives herself electric shocks with a thumb operated device.

My mother has always been a talker, but tells her stories to so many relatives she has often repeated herself. It has struck me how my father doesn't really seem to notice this. For years they have had the habit of telling me the same stories time and again, as if for the first time, even on consecutive days when we are staying with them.

My mother's memory was noticeably worse this time. She asked perhaps twenty times if we had visited our friends in Seaton since we had arrived back in the country and if they were coming to see us.

While she is forgetting things, she also has false memories. She was convinced she had been with me in my car when someone crashed into the back of it two years ago. In retelling the story, she has placed herself at the scene.

Her spatial memory is being affected. She won't travel into town on her own anymore to visit the shops because she is worried she won't find her way home.

But she remembers more active times without rancour, reminding us as she pushes her trolley of our long walks on family holidays.

Remembering remembering

Perhaps I was becoming complacent after finding it much easier than expected to remember every day that passes.

Looking back over the past 10-day window, the memory tags for Monday and Tuesday were a blank. I should have made more effort to consolidate them.

It was not so much that I couldn't remember what I had done of those days - they were still fresh. It was the memory tag that eluded me.

Sometimes I remember the act of remembering, of deciding - usually as I review the day as I lay down to sleep - that the memory tag for today will be a particular image.

Sometimes the day links with other days, joining the dots of the narrative of the story of my life. I remember how it struck me at the time of remembering that the day was linked to another.

Sometimes during the course of the day I take a step back and consciously decide to capture the image of the moment. This happened on 3 March as I sat with my wife and my parents, who had come to visit, enjoying tea and scones outside a café on an unexpectedly sunny day, watching sparrows, blue tits and chaffinches hop onto the tables to peck up crumbs near to where we sat.

I not only remember the moment, but deciding to remember the moment.

My memory tags for Monday and Tuesday came back to me soon enough.

Now remembering they were a little difficult to remember helps me to remember them!

Joining the dots

A new aid to remembering every day of my life has emerged recently: joining the dots.

My principal technique for remembering is to pin an image that captures the essence of the day to my mental calendar. Reviewing these memory tags in subsequent days entrenches them in my long-term memory. All the same, sometimes looking back it takes a moment or two to remember the image for a particular day. The fact there are no plot holes in life helps me to bring back the image in the end.

What I find is also helping is joining the dots between memory tags.

As an example, it was 10 February when our friend Sandra gave birth to Laura. On my mental calendar a line stretches from this day to 29 February, when my wife and I had recovered from our colds and were able to visit Laura for the first time.

This is a step beyond being able to view the narrative to a story in my life. It is an aide memoir. If I am stuck with remember 29 February, I can feel there is a line stretching back to 10 February and Laura's birth. Sensing the line - the fact there is a line - helps me to recall the image that was temporarily out of reach.

It is a short cut. Stuck for the 29 February? Remember 10 February.

This wouldn't be useful if remembering these linkages between days was an extra burden. It's not something I'm forcing. There are few days on my mental calendar linked by these lines.

The joins that do exist between the dots have emerged naturally.

They are another way my mind is helping me to remember.

Remembering to listen

Conversation between couples can degenerate into arguments with undignified rapidity because a phrase invokes memories of past conflicts.

They have been described as "toothpaste" arguments, where a comment about leaving the top off the toothpaste leads to a tennis game of volleys about the faults of the other.

I've seen bickering couples and they are all the same. Offense is taken not at what is said, but how it is said. A comment can be the start of a familiar chain of criticism and sometimes it seems quicker to jump to offense being taken without the journey to get there.

Saddest of all is rehashing the argument in an attempt to convince the other where the fault lies: "I said... then you said..."

I so don't want to be part of that couple.

But I had just that feeling when I took the wrong bus in the Capital two weeks ago. Because of my error we had to walk for 5 minutes rather than dropping right in front of our destination. A simple mistake - I recognised the number of the bus because it was one we took often. What I forgot was we needed to go a little further on this occassion.

Even writing this I feel the emotion of hurt at the unwarranted criticism and patronising instruction to check in future. I struggle to think of anyone else who would speak to me in such a way, coming up only with my parents or a teacher when I was six years old.

At the same time I am angry because I know that with friends - or in past relationships - such a mistake would be no issue at all. Instead of sucking joy out of the day, it would have passed in a second as nothing of importance.

I am breathless at the injustice. With the situations reversed, I would have accepted the mistake cheerfully. I know for a fact that I accept far worse errors with words of reassurance not castigation.

Explaining I don't want to be spoken to in this way does no good. In fact, it generally leads to a circle of justifications and recriminations. "I said... you said..."

Nooooo.

Then I had a thought.

The hurt I feel, I think most partners feel, in these situations is fundamentally because I cannot understand how my wife could speak to me in this way if she loved me.

That old chestnut of it is not what is said, but how it is said.

My responses are no doubt as hurtful, even if I know that I wouldn't go down this bickering path if she hadn't started it. "You said... so I said..."

The clue, however, surely lies in the fact I am made to feel that I am six again.

In truth, it is not my wife that makes me feel that way. It is my reaction to her in these situations.

Certainly that childhood feeling of injustice, hurt and anger is real. But I am no longer six.

So I decided the next time not to argue back but to listen to the criticism. To explore it. I may be disappointed that my wife is sometimes so annoyed by little things, but is the underlying cause that she does not love me? Or is it just her feet are tired and she's really pissed at the thought of having to walk even five minutes more?

My memory tag for the 21 February is one word: listening.

It was the first opportunity I had to put this approach into practice. It passed off okay.