Cradock - Memory, like chance, would be a fine thing if only you hadn’t just forgotten the thing you were trying to remember, or could remember the thing that you’d just forgotten.
Or could forget the thing you would rather not remember.
Yet a memory can return in an instant, unexpectedly, brought back by a smell that reminds you of where you were on a September evening in 1968, or a song that takes you back to a beach holiday in Durban where it was playing day in and day out on LM Radio.
A spoonful of crayfish mayonnaise and I’m back at the Doll’s House drive-in eatery at Mouille Point, Cape Town, with the window wound down and a tray attached to it piled with a chilled crayfish tail lavished with mayo, a pile of crisp potato chips and a tomato salad.
A mouthful of bitter – and north country beers are the best, my English cousins assure me – and I’m transported to a pub in Yorkshire in 1987.
A glug of creamy, black Guinness and I’m at Moody’s pub in Wexford, in the south-east of Ireland, in 1996 as locals trudge in carrying fiddles and banjos and bodhrans to sing and play the night away.
Just as any piece of music that includes the bodhran, the Celtic frame drum that you see and hear throughout Ireland, instantly makes me taste Guinness and the joy of watching a skilled barman ritually pour one, as if in a trance.
They say the older you get, the less you seem to remember, but that this isn’t because your brain is addled but because you have stored so much information in your lifetime that it cannot be expected to just come to the fore on demand. This makes absolute sense, and even if it isn’t true I will be adhering to the theory from now on. If I remember it.
But it does make sense: if your mind is active, if you still read, watch documentaries and complex drama series, go back to classic movies and watch them again, and spend much time deep in thought.
I watched The Great Escape the other day, which I first saw when I was about 8 years old. I was gobsmacked at how much of it was as familiar as if I had watched it last week. Yet decades had passed. What this means is that, even if those memories were very far from top of mind, they were able to come instantly back to the front of my mind.
I often think the songs we know and love are stored on tracks in our minds just as they are stored on hard drives or on old long playing records or on DVDs. When I was compiling a playlist of songs from the 1960s and 1970s a few months ago, I found myself remembering the lyrics – all the lyrics – of songs I first memorised in the 1960s, and which I had long “forgotten”. Yet clearly I hadn’t.
There are of course songs one would rather forget and each of us will have a different list. I desperately desire to forget Jennifer Rush’s The Power of Love, and Celine Dion belting out My Heart Will Go On as the passengers and crew of the Titanic fling themselves overboard to get away.
Ironically, for me, one of the songs I would prefer not to remember is Trevor Nunn’s Memory, from the Lloyd-Webber musical Cats. Such are the idiosyncrasies of life.
Musings on memory came to mind the other day after I had bought some pears for a lunch for which I had been going to make pears in red wine, forgetting I had changed my mind and offered the group raspberry ice cream and berries as a dessert.
I couldn’t just switch back, as the group had accepted my proposed menu, so for some days I puzzled over the pears which were now ageing a little in the crisper of my fridge.
They had been out of the fridge in a basket for the first two days, but as the thermometer climbed into the early 40s I did the sensible thing and moved them to a colder, kinder place.
There’s nothing that pleases the palate more on days like these than a scoop or two of a crisply icy sorbet.
Pear sorbet
6 to 8 ripe pears
3 cups (750ml) cold water
1 cup (250ml) castor sugar
1 star anise (optional)
whites of 2 jumbo eggs
Peel and core the pears, then cut the flesh into small pieces. Bring the water and castor sugar to a boil, then add the pear pulp and bring back to the boil. Reduce to a gentle bubble and allow to cook for 15 to 20 minutes for the pear to soften.
Remove from the stove and leave to cool to room temperature.
Blend the mixture thoroughly.
Pour into a container, seal it, and freeze for five or six hours.
Remove from the freezer and stir thoroughly to break the mixture up. If it’s too hard, scoop it into a blender and whiz it and refreeze.
Repeat the above process after a few more hours, but before refreezing, do the following.
Whisk the egg whites to soft peak stage and fold this into the mixture. Return to the freezer to freeze again. If it does not set without separating, repeat this process after a few hours.
Weekend Argus