Brain Drain

Missing: 28 years of accumulated memory. Identifying characteristics: paranoid fantasy; half-baked feminist deconstruction; lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (I’m not proud); no geographical knowledge whatsoever. Reward for information leading to its return: eternal gratitude. And a bun.

In explanation, I was in the local on Monday evening (start the week as you mean to go on), and ‘assisting’ Amy Tree and Karaokie Blokie with various games on that devious time-wasting contrivance, the pub quiz machine. More like a psychological torture device that charges you for the pleasure of mocking your ignorance, I quickly became disenchanted with the idea of feeding precious gin money into its sneering maw. Not, however, before I had seriously begun to doubt the existence of a section of my brain which is supposed to store information, some of it acquired at great expense over 3 years at university. At best I was able to assist with answers to the blindingly obvious questions, along the lines of ‘Who directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier?…A) William Shatner B) Andy Pandy C) Nitrous Oxide D) Marxism’. More commonly, I would gaze quizzically at the rapidly decreasing timer as if the questions were in Cantonese, perhaps mumbling “I think maybe….” as if the act of speaking would summon something, anything, resembling knowledge from my mind, which had at this point turned its back and was pretending to examine intently something very interesting on the other side of the room.

I’m not saying I’m stupid. I have been known, on occasion, to make useful, possibly even engaging contributions to conversation, and hold down a job which often requires me to contribute some sort of intellectual effort. But the lack of ability to access anything resembling trivia, general knowledge or, that thing of which I am most envious, a joke, is starting to cause significant social problems. I would be very happy if someone could tell me the medical term for the inability to recall information on demand in a competitive environment, preferably in Latin so I can intellectualise it. And promptly forget it.