My memory is notoriously bad. I feel awful when my children ask me about things from their childhoods and I look blank. Or, even worse, they remind me about a conversation we had the week before and I have no recollection of it at all.

This week though I had four whole seconds of complete blankness.

I was dropping a friend off at her house – one of those terraces in Bristol where you have to take your chance on finding somewhere to park on the road. “I bet you don’t have this problem at your house,” she said.

I thought about it, but couldn’t for the life of me picture my street. Did I have to park on the road? Did I have a drive? I thought about it some more, but really wasn’t sure where I lived. The moment lasted a good three or four seconds. Count to four in your mind now – it’s quite a long time to not be able to remember where you live.

So what I want to know is, is this normal?? 

We all lead very busy lives nowadays, and have a lot of information coming at as from a lot of different angles. When I was younger it was face to face communications, the television, the telephone, (plugged into the wall at home), and print media. Now it’s all of the above, plus the vastness that is the internet. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, news websites, emails – it’s a never ending stream of facts and figures, most of them completely unnecessary. 

So is it to be expected that some things will get forgotten? Is it natural that as our brains get fuller and fuller, we will struggle to hold it all inside our heads?

Do you find yourself forgetting simple things, or am I losing the plot?

memory loss

Image – conrado/shutterstock.

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I mean actual fudge. Sweet enough, but sticky, soft and soporific.

Like this:

FudgeI have always been notoriously forgetful, not even able to recall whole conversations from only days previously, but I had thought it was an adorable sort of absent-mindedness – the sort you could laugh fondly about. Lately though it feels more like the worrying sort of slowness and makes you glad you don’t have a baby, for fear of leaving it behind in a supermarket trolley.

The irony of course is that I can’t remember whether this feeling is really new, or I’ve just forgotten that I felt the same this time last year.

It feels sometimes like there are vital connections not quite right in my brain. I can see things happening, but they are distant, like I am watching myself do them, laughing silently at my own ineptitude. I feel a little disconnected – both from things happening around me and internally – and it is quite disconcerting.

Aside from the usual things like not being able to remember the words for simple things like ‘bread’ and ‘cat’, two things happened this week that added further weight to my brain into fudge concerns. Firstly, I tried to buy a drink from a vending machine. A simple enough task you might think for a woman educated to degree level.

It looked like this one:

Vending machine

After figuring out how to put the coins in, I spent some time touching the picture of the bottle of Diet Coke, trying to work out why the drink wasn’t appearing anywhere, before realising I was literally just pawing at a picture like a not terribly well trained chimp and actually had to press one of the buttons at the side.

Thankfully no one was watching. For the second incident I wasn’t so fortunate.

I was driving through McDonald’s. (I don’t spend my entire life buying fast food and fizzy drinks, I promise.) I had placed my order and driven to the next window to pay.

I paid. So far so good. ‘Excellent,’ I thought to myself, ‘that’s that done,’ and I drove off. I was turning the corner back out into the main car park before I realised I hadn’t actually collected my food. I reversed awkwardly all the way back round to the final window, where a teenage boy with questionable skin was holding out a brown paper bag, looking confused.

“Oh silly me!” I said, trying to sound casual about the fact that I was clearly on the verge of dementia, grabbed the bag and drove off for a second time.

Seriously, what is the matter with me? Does this sort of thing ever happen to you or should I be making some sort of appointment??

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