The first 29 years pass uneventfully...

Funny thing memory. It's how I can say "I'm not going to go down this dark alley; the last time I did I was mugged" or, "I'm never playing football again; the last time I did the ball hit me in the face and my glasses flew off to the mirth of all assembled". It tells us which of two potential arrow-targets is the apple, and which our trusting son.

Any yet this Darwinian function, at which the memory so wonderfully never fails to deliver (have you ever forgotten how to walk? No. Who your friends are? Well, possibly...) is not the yardstick against which memory is judged. No, it's all about: "God, I never remember people's birthdays" or "Shit I've forgotten the PIN for my mobile phone". These socially constructed tasks are just not what the memory is good at. Something else it's not good at is measuring time. In the same way the the human eye is a very poor judge of volume (the old "which glass is bigger? this really tall thin one or this really short but very broad one" trick) so the memory makes this morning seem like a former life and Sgt. Pepper's like something you've recently got into.

Turning 29, as I do on Sunday, makes me think about what it has all added up to. If I don't think carefully about it, the tempting answer is "not much". This is characterised by the sense of panic I felt when an old, much-beloved teacher from Secondary school contacted me out of the blue on Facebook. I thought "Christ, I must have been full of promise as a fifteen-year-old. What have I become/done which would do anything other than disappoint this former steward of mine?". Similarly, when I got back in touch with an old friend from Cambridge last week (via Google, ruler of every aspect of modern life) I felt like I could happily bring him up to speed with me and my life in about 6 sentences. Went to Uni; lived in Cambridge; went to France never to return; returned; went to London; went back to Uni. And my memory assists in this perception by its ability to scan over events really quickly. Even when writing those six sentences, it doesn't seem that implausible that someone who knew me when I was fifteen would now know everything there was to know about the 29-year-old me.

But memory is not designed for thinking about a whole life. It's not its default mode. By default, when you ask it "what have I done in my life" it gives you manageable highlights. Flashes of retina-content which accompanied three or four easily memorable events. To try and counteract this default behaviour, I tried this as an exercise: How many times have I felt a surge of endorphin and an unexplained delight at having the sun suddenly break through cloud and hit me in the face? Can I recall the times? Can I remember all the times I sat surrounded by friends and cloaked in a beer haze and felt like everything was perfect?

When you think about the ludicrous expanse of time that takes up a single year, it's mind-boggling. I regularly have weeks where, at the end, I can't even begin to picture what I was doing at the start.

Anyway, in summary. Life is ridiculously long. It's the longest thing I can imagine. A year contains a thousand times more interesting facts, funny moments, tasty bananas, sunny mornings and feelings of mutual understanding than even the best of memories can cope with (let alone my cotton-wool coated effort). Trying to summarise it into a "what have I achieved" is meaningless.

I'm still alive. I'm not yet a mean, intolerant old bigot. That's good enough for me.

Bis später,
Rob