I Remember When...

Dear hearts,

Miss Mich's terribly efficient Aide de Camp, Ms LA, has made the comment that she feels swamped by an “Epidemic of Goldfish”. You can imagine my raised brow as I asked her to Please Explain…

It’s not often Miss Mich comes across another as acerbic as herself, but the ever capable Ms LA has a sharp mind and sharp tongue. That is why I love her so.

Apparently, the simple yet stylish goldfish has a memory span of 4 seconds. This may be the reason that they have ended up swimming in circles in bowls whilst salmon have the glory of swimming upstream, bears excepted.

Memory….

Pardon?....Oh yes. Ms LA has made the inference that Miss Mich can sometimes be a little vague in terms of her recollection of the morning’s events, her latest marketing plan for pen domination in the far far north or whom, sorry what, she did last Tuesday. A fair call perhaps, or is it a cunning plan of Miss Mich’s to appear somewhat less than on the ball?, the red herring that masks the mind like a steel trap..to quote our favourite detective Maxwell Smart. Now there was a man…

Miss Mich’s ruse and blonde hair aside, I feel compelled to share with you the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s introduction to the meaning of memory.I dare you to read on and remember…

‘Memory’ is a label for a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which humans and perhaps other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Our particular abilities to conjure up long-gone episodes of our lives are both familiar and puzzling. We remember experiences and events which are not happening now, so memory seems to differ from perception. We remember events which really happened, so memory is unlike pure imagination. Memory seems to be a source of knowledge, or perhaps just is retained knowledge. Remembering is often suffused with emotion. It is an essential part of much reasoning. It is connected in obscure ways with dreaming. Some memories are shaped by language, others by imagery. Much of our moral life depends on the peculiar ways in which we are embedded in time.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Miss Mich remembers as a child the thought that “soon I will be a grown up and this childhood will not count”. How wrong I was. Damn you memory..

We are the sum total of our experiences and the memories of such experiences. What we do with these little darlings shapes us into the adults we become. Our memories are the stories we tell. To our friends, our loved ones and our children. It is possible that time can distort our memories, can bend the experiences and shift the shapes of what may or may not have happened. And even though we may wish not to have certain memories, we cannot escape them.

Miss Mich’s best stories of the last 10 years or so are some of her favourite memories. The Bright Young Things are perpetual favourite memories. And sharing with you Dear hearts, Miss Mich’s most secret and scandalous memories, add to the depth of experience. Both present and past.

Enjoy Monday (all of them)

With love
Miss Mich