Memories.
When people tell you their first memory, the only thing that you can be absolutely certain of is that they’re lying. There is no one for whom memory works at such a sophisticated level that it can absolutely determine the first thing you thought that cached itself to the back of your brain, only to be dredged up again when someone is bored enough to ask what your first memory was.
This is not to say that one can’t have any recollection of their early childhood, because that’s obviously ridiculous. I read somewhere that the majority of learning we do in our lives all happens before we turn three years old. Sounds astonishing but when you think of it, most of the knowledge that we take for granted as adults is not just automatically implanted into our brains at birth, but naturally comes to fruition over a period of time — colours, letters, how to eat things and go to the loo. These things get subsumed in the deepest nether-regions of our hippocampus and we never remember them again, they just are. We don’t remember these things in the same way that we recall every time we have been betrayed by those we love or the complete dialogue of every single Harry Potter movie. Or is that just me?…
In reality, we don’t timestamp our memories in the same way we do nights out on our Facebook timeline. Memories do not consist of concretized facts, but of abstract smells, sounds, and thoughts. Sometimes your brain tricks you by thinking something, and that solitary thought becomes a memory without you even verbalizing it or writing it down. Sometimes that thought has nothing to do with your situation or surroundings at the time you thought it — I have a very strong memory of being around nine years, worrying about the day I would get my first wrinkle whilst ambling through the lemur enclosure at Longleat Safari Park. I couldn’t tell you why my nine-year-old brain decided to agonise over premature ageing at that particular time and place, but it did.
When people tell you their first memory (like you even care) what they are really doing is sifting through the plethora of potential first memories, i.e. everything they can possibly remember from the first six years of their life, and picking the one that they think makes sound the most interesting. Or they just compose their own completely fabricated memory to make them sound more interesting. People speak about their first memories as though they even matter. Not only does no one around you really care, but I sincerely doubt anyone is actually properly listening to you when you tell them. They’re all too busy worrying about which of their many childhood memories doesn’t make them sound weird or criminally liable.
Everyone says that their first memory is of watching their grandfather smoke a pipe whilst watching Dad’s Army, and that that was the moment of divine inspiration they had for becoming a successful stand-up comedian, or that their first memory was running through the fields of Gloucestershire with their brothers and sisters on their way to the local pond to do some innocent frogspawn-spotting, as though their childhood was akin to something out of the Famous Five or that Seamus Heaney poem we all had to do at GCSE. In reality, it’s more likely to be a hissy fit you threw in ASDA when your mum wouldn’t let you waste a quid on a thirty-second ride on the Noddy-mobile.
I think it’s fairly obvious that I worry about memories a lot. I worry about what I will remember on my deathbed. I worry about losing my memories when inevitably I am the victim of a terrible car crash that causes severe and permanent brain damage. I worry about the next time someone might ask me what my first memory is and I can’t answer without taking so long about it that it becomes obvious that the real answer to the question is that I can only vaguely recall my sister vomiting all over me and having to sit there stewing in it for the rest of a five-hour car journey to Cornwall. And I don’t even know whether I only remember that because of my mother bringing it up so many times that it has become embedded in my pre-frontal cortex.
I think my biggest worry though is that one day I will become famous, have a glittering career in broadcasting and satirical journalism that spans decades, and then it will come the time when the next obvious thing to do will be to write the memoir that everyone who has ever been contracted by the BBC seems obligated to do. I won’t even know where to start. How on earth will I differentiate between the many childhood trips I took to Legoland? How will I know which memories make me sound more or less like a sociopath? And how will anyone ever know if what I purport to be my first ever memory, actually is my first memory? What if it’s really the fourth or fifth? I think the only solution to this problem would be a start a diary immediately. But the first twenty-three years of my life are already painfully unchronicled and so starting now seems pathetically sycophantic, and doesn’t really solve the issue at all. The later I begin my calling as a diarist, the less likely it becomes that I will ever start one, and in turn, the more likely it will be that all my mediocre and sometimes downright-depressing memories will dissipate into that vague realm of ‘when did that happen?’, ‘what year was that?’ and ‘were you there? I can’t quite remember’. Maybe the best thing to do is resign myself to the prospect of early-onset dementia immediately, and be done with the whole thing.