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Thinking back on Thursday 2 January 2014 to when 2013 was also new, I could remember clear images that were not included in the memory tags I had chosen to pin to my mental calendar.

However, I wasn't sure whether some of these events took place on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.

Following the same procedure of not sweating about it when I cannot recall memory tags, I decided not to worry about it. A few hours later, I found I was able to associate the events with the memory tags I had chosen.

As one of the events was going for a run, I was able to look back through the records on my phone app and confirmed that I had pieced the days together correctly.

Happy New Years

I now have two years full of memory tags: 2012 and 2013.

In my last post I explained that I have dropped the visualisation of the calendars holding my memory tags rotating away on a drum as 2014 begins. That was disorientating. It made the days seem more distant when I reviewed selected images.

So now I can step left in my mind's eye to stand on the same day in previous years. Running through the images on the same day of each month as part of my refresh technique, was as familiar as when I did this at the time.

I realised I could take this sense of remembering remembering a step further.
The blank days full of promise for 2014 reminded me that 2012 and 2013 had begun the same way.

Recalling the same days when these years were new, I tried to remember that feeling of expectation, even though each year is now filled with experiences and memories.

No more drum

I have just run into a problem with the mental calendar I use to remember every day that passes.

The calendar in my mind's eye is like a month-to-view calendar over which I walk. I have visualised the 12 sheets for 2013 laid on a drum in front of the flaming digits of the year.

With the New Year, the drum rotated. I stepped from 31 December 2013 - far from the digits of 2013 - to 1 January 2014, right below the flaming number.

As if by magic this closed off 2013 as complete.

But today I found a problem in my morning review. This involves recalling the images for two days per week over the past six months. It being Thursday 2 January 2014, I began with 2 July 2013 - a Tuesday, I recall, then 3rd and 4th July to bring me to the Thursday. From then on I recalled the images pinned to the Wednesday and Thursday of each week up to 2 December 2013, then ran through the day sequentially until I reached today.

It struck me how different the sensation was to the review I conducted on 31 December 2013. The year was done.

A little later I had some spare minutes and so decided to run through my long review, which is for a day per month, in this case the 2nd of each month.

Here's where the drum visualisation presented a problem. Walking over the days in 2011 and 2012 seemed very different, as if the drum was now fixed on 2014 and those calendar sheets were at sharply inclined angles.

I found it so disconcerting I decided to scrap the whole drum visualisation outright and have the years stretching out on a flat plane - the past to the left, the future to the right.

Now the sensation when I am walking over the calendar for past years is the same as when I first laid down the pinned the images down as memory tags. One thing I've learned is that familiarity and repetition in the review process is a great benefit.

Curiously, I initially found my mind's eye automatically saw the numbers for the past years as less luminescent. This is something I've corrected – I went every year to remain fresh.

Closing the year

As television stations and newspapers conducted their reviews of 2013, I decided to do my own.

I have images pinned to my mental calendar for every day of the year and so ran through them all sequentially from 1 January 2013.

It was straightforward - the images felt familiar from being refreshed at least once per month. More recent images are refreshed twice per week using my current refresh technique.

I had been feeling for a while that 2013 was getting old, partly because 2014 has been figuring more and more in my calendar of forthcoming events, partly because I have been filling the days of my mental calendar.

I orientate myself around my mental calendar as if I am walking over the month-to-view sheets, laid out before the digits of the year. As the year has progressed, I have moved progressively further away from the flaming 2013 I see in my mind's eye. Today the drum on which the calendar sheets sit has rotated to the left and I stand on 1 January, staring up at 2014.

All the same, there is still something fresh about the year now over: in every review during the past year, I have stepped from 2012 upto the number 2013.

That feeling will probably wear off as 2014 replaces 2013 as the new year.

My wife and I are physically in the same place where we spent last New Year, so thinking back a year during recent days reminds me of the same places and people. Both have changed over the past year, even though the months have passed one day at a time.

Back again

We came to my wife's country for Christmas and will be staying for a few months.

These times of relocation are when I really appreciate being able to remember where I was for every day of the past two years.

As we return to familiar places and meet up with family and friends for the first time since our last visit, I have a sense of continuation. In conversation I can answer the questions, "When were we last here?", "When did we last meet?"

I've noted before how time away seems to vanish with a change in location. I spent 7 months in my country this year - and when I was there I felt I was home and had been on a trip.

Now I have the same feeling back in my wife's country.

But the fact I periodically refresh the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags means the time elsewhere does not disappear into a fog.

The long view

Now that I am embarking on my third year of remembering every day that passes, I can take advantage of a rather pleasing phenomena: I know exactly where I was and what I was doing on the same date one and two years ago.

Today is Sunday 22nd December 2013.

A year ago, I know the date was a day earlier. On Saturday 22nd December 2012, I was at a family gathering.

Two years earlier and the date was two days earlier, 2012 being a leap year, giving me Thursday 22 December 2011. In any case, the image pinned to my mental calendar tells me it was a Thursday. I am in a café with my wife and niece having lunch on a Christmas shopping trip. I remember I will leave them to go and see a podiatrist and collect them later.

From time to time I've tried to remember the same dates going back through the years. Now I have two definite points of reference for past years, I'm motivated to try to make this a more routine part of my reviews to see what happens. Even if I cannot find images for specific dates, it would be nice to have images for the each month - or even just the year.

Early on in this process, I switched from remembering from the present to the past, to the other way around. In my current review process, I start 6 months ago and pass a two-day window over each week, moving towards the present. In my longer term review, I start in January 2011 and remember a day per month moving forward to the present.

So yesterday I thought I would try to remember every December from the year of my birth to the present. I did not get far. Firstly, I had to scale back my ambition to remembering something specific to the year. I have memories from before I began going to school. School years are marked by different classes and teachers.

My pre-school memories are few, but I could read before I started school, so I tried to find memories of learning to read. This theme opened a rich vein. It brought to mind early books and comments, and later, favourite authors and trips to towns where I visited book shops, sometimes with my father as my mother looked at other things.

None of these memories are attached to dates and it is difficult to identify even a particular year.

I began this process after reading of people with hyperthymesia, who can remember every day from their early childhood.

I had a happy childhood and have been very fortunate with life as a whole, but some negative experiences of bullying when a child and drug use and breakdown when a young adult, have overshadowed much of these decades, such that they feel locked behind frosted glass. When those times passed and I made peace with myself, I have been in such a rush to make the most of life, that living in the moment has overshadowed the past. I've rarely looked back.

Having found so much positive in being able to remember every day of the past two years, I wonder how things would have been different had I began this process earlier. I suspect the perspective would have been a great help: I would have remembered most of my days were happy as I lived them and had a greater sense of self when under attack. Although my demons have long been laid to rest, it may be I can break through the frosted glass by putting days in their proper place now.

Why bother? Well, firstly this is an experiment and I want to see what happens. Secondly, my parents are now old in years and as I feel increasingly they will need my help, it is good to be reminded that they are not weak, but coped with raising a family, with raising me, and with all that life threw at them.

Year three begins

It was two years ago that I began this process of remembering every day that passes.

As I enter the third year, I see no reason to stop. The process I have developed is manageable and rewarding. Sustainable. At least for now. Perhaps there will come a time when I have to change the review process that I find essential not to lose days, but not yet.

Various postings on this blog record the benefits I find from this process. They go beyond being able to remember where I was on any day and the corollory of being able to remember when I visited a particular place or when something happened during this period.

I have a fresh perspective on time, one that continues to develop.

Recently my mother has started to lose her short-term memory. She repeats the same stories and questions. When I last saw her she kept commenting that time seems to speed up as you age and asking if I find the same.

Not as such. Not any more.

I know how long a year is. I hold every day of the last two years in my mind.

A year is a long time. That's 365 or 366 memory tags to remember for each year, pinned to my mental calendar. Remembering this sequence of 731 days using the techniques I have developed is not difficult, even though it is a lot of days lived.

When I choose the image to pin to my mental calendar to represent that day in my life, I decide the events, people and feelings encompassed in the image that I will remember forever. I don't consciously try to capture every moment of every day, just the memory tags, which then serve as a portal I can drop through to recall so much more about the day, building and branching from the reference point I carry with me.

There are transitions between places and experiences in the sequence of days. The first three quarters of 2012 was basically a happy time, one of the happiest years I have spent. And then a young relative was diagnosed with cancer. The last 14 months of memories contain the last days I spent with this relative, the periods I was away from my wife when I had to work in my country and she was visiting hers to give support. Receiving the news of my relative's death is a memory tag I would rather not have.

I am grateful that the memories of the days spent together have not become one indistinguishable mass: I remember when and where we went out for a family breakfast or lunch. At least during this period. Looking further back, I have isolated memories with no firm date or even year attached. These are important, but they are different and bring home to me the difference between passively remembering something that happened and actively choosing to remember, to store and retain a memory for future retrieval.

Memories change with distance in a quite peculiar way, I have found. Like all the days of the past two years, I have revisited 17 December 2011 at regular intervals in the reviews that refresh the images. That day has gone from being yesterday to being two years ago. In the memory tag, my wife and I are having lunch with a pregnant friend and her husband. Their daughter is now someone we have come to know. She is there in a set of images pinned to my mental calendar from the day we received the news she had been born. I have the day I first saw her and images of her changing from a perpetually sleeping baby to an energetic toddler.

I too have changed as I have experienced new things, one of them being this process of remembering.

In several regards this has been profound. As I have moved around a lot, between my own country and that of my wife, particularly in the last 14 months, I am reminded in my reviews of where I have been and that those places continue, with the people I love still in them. While I still try to live in the moment, behind my eyes I carry the world with me and in each review return to the places I have been.

The places I will go in the future seem a little different too. I have always been well organised when it comes to transitions and travel - and so generally taken them in my stride and been relaxed about them. Visualising logistics, particularly during this difficult year, has had a different flavour to it, however, because events written in my diary become memory tags on my mental calendar as the future changes to past. This is not exactly unnerving, but I am struck sometimes by the illusion that I am a wavefront travelling along a pre-existing timeline.

On a more positive note, I am less inclined to worry about forthcoming events or possible problems - or at least I am able to decide the time for worrying is not now: I will face what I need to face at the appropriate time. Quite often problems fail to materialise or are resolved if they are not worried at. Or if action is required when the time comes, things may well have started to slot into place and solutions emerged from my subconscious.

Perhaps the most profound change from this process is to do with my sense of mental well-being.

While I am aware there is something obsessive about running through a selection of images each and every day, I feel this is a healthy obsession. It is based on the solid foundation of real things, real people and real events. Even though the reviews take up just a short part of my day, perhaps 20 minutes, they ground me. Outside that time, I am getting on with life and not over analysing what I am doing and how I am feeling, which I may have done in the past, particularly during stressful times.

This process provides a daily reminder of the obvious statement that nothing lasts forever.

Be it good. Be it bad. Be it time spent with loved ones.