I have a friend who’s a neuroscientist. One of my dearest and best pals. He doesn’t do the brain stuff these days. He’s in fintech. A word my spell-checker hasn’t underlined or corrected which I am happily taking as one of the abundant signs of the impending apocalypse. We used to be flatmates. Back then, as far as I know, was when all the research into memory revealed that many of our memories are actually acts of imagination. That because of the way our neurones fire, and rebuild past events in our minds, a lot of it might not be drawing from stored memory but created on the fly to fill in gaps.

Like that bit from the video tour in Jurassic Park where they, using the magic of animation, plug frog DNA into dinosaur DNA, we ourselves are plugging our imagination neurones into our memory neurones to make a T-Rex.

(I know that that is not how neurones work)

I used to ask him about the memory stuff but I’m not sure I was smart enough to understand his answers.

I have a good memory. Except for when I don’t, which is another story, but for the most part, I have a very, very good memory. It’s something I’ve worked on since I was a little kid. I remember lying upside down on a staircase in a flat my dad’s company rented in 1985, before we moved to London but while we were still here a lot, and looking up at the dim bulb at the top of the stairs, and thinking to myself, “I bet I remember this in thirty years”. Thirty-years ago was seven years ago this coming September.

Nothing interesting happened in that moment. I just found myself, as a nine year-old, in a weird spot on a staircase. I had probably been in similar spots several times that day. They were steep stairs and fun to fuck about on. In my mind they were whitewashed but carpeted down the centre. For some reason I think the carpet was a pale blue.. Perhaps aquamarine. I think that part’s bullshit. I think that’s a bit of frog DNA fucking up my T-Rex. But I know that moment happened because I promised myself I’d remember it. And because I promised myself I would remember it, every time I thought about any promise I ever made in the 36 and a half years between now and then, a little flash of that moment would pop up, reminding me.

As far as I know that was the first time I ever really thought about memory. Contorted, upside down, in an underlit stairwell in the mid-eighties Trying from then on to, basically, remember stuff.

Obviously it’s selective and entirely useless academically. It’s not a memory palace or some easy way of regurgitating the right pub quiz answer at the right time. Instead it’s kind of accidental. It never worked with studying or reading something for school or university. But it seems to work with people, and the folks I’ve met along the way. The good times and often the bad. The bad ones get stuck on loop sometimes, but even with those I like to think, to hope that the memories are more T-Rex than frog DNA.

And it’s nice when someone who hasn’t seen you in 30 years asks about something and you remember it clearly. You remember them and what you ate together and what you drank after going to see a shitty movie. Buying a bottle of cider and a bottle of Martini (I’m pretty sure it was Extra Dry, but our age suggests it may have been Bianco - we were way ahead of the vermouth revival), very underage, from a Victoria Wine in King’s Langley in 1991. We only dated for three or four weeks but it seems longer.

Isolation is fertile ground for revisiting stuff like this. Wondering which vivid pieces of memory are real and which are made up. A grand mosaic, some pieces fired porcelain, some plastic, fitting together to tell a larger story that, viewed from a distance, provides no indication of which piece is which.

Maybe the mosaic thing works better than frog DNA and T-Rex DNA? It’s prettier.

You folks know you can buy my books, right? Here (winemaking book) and here (novel).