On the tip of your tongue is not the right expression for a memory that just won’t materialise, I find. When I am trying to remember something and strain the brain to get the word to emerge, I don’t sense anything on the tip of my tongue. I sense it in my brain, slowly but inexorably pushing towards my consciousness. I imagine a grey or light brown brain and this smudge pushing itself painfrully out. It’s a little like a particularly recalcitant turd that won’t be rushed. You just have to wait for it to come. Some coffee might coax it out. The obtuse word will materialise the next day when you’re not even looking for it. I wonder if there are acts you can accomplish to hurry a word out. Straining to think hard about it doesn’t help. You start making fruitless leaps of the imagination. You imagine it starts with a certain letter and go cavorting up a barren path.

Today I was trying to remember a French translation I once found for the idea of Hammer horror, that is to say the gruesome world of gothic melodrama. I knew I had once found a nice equivalent for it. Gradually it came to the surface, revealing more and more facettes as it emerged. It was a word somehow connected with marionettes and theatre. I kept worrying at it and it came to me. Grand guignol. That was it. I felt I had willed the word out of the brain. There was no tip of the tongue about it.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

Some time ago I received an email from an old friend thanking me for some minor thing I had once done. It was a spare email of just one sentence. I was pleased he was getting in touch with me and emailed him back, asking about his news and giving some of mine. He did not reply. I have thought about this. I think it is the equivalent of what alcoholics do when they apologise to everyone as part of their treatment. This must be what you do when you know you are dying; you thank everyone you knew for what they contributed to your life. It may be that there is also a list of people you have to apologise to. A ledger, then: positive and negative. This kind of act would have you dying at ease with your past. I am making all this up but I think it is quite possible. If so, when you draw up your ledger, who would you include and what acts would you judge generous and what pernicious? It could well have been that the little act that I accomplished came across to him as an act of generosity but was, if he had known, in fact motivated by egotism or part of some more complex plot on my part.

Another old friend, meeting up with me after a long period, said: how will I know if you die? I’m not sure about the answer to this one. I suppose, thinking about it now, I could make sure I give someone close to me access to my email account and they could send out a group email. I am not on social media, so that would have to do. I might even write the message myself.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

We had to cancel the Mindfulness walk on Hampstead Heath this morning. I must say I wasn’t too fussed. Or rather, I was pretty fussed…about not going. It seems to me once you start doing things in categories you’re getting things wrong. Once you start using the word spirituality, you can be pretty sure you’re going about things in the wrong way. If you are making a separate category for things spiritual, you are probably seeing the rest of your life wrong. I saw a woman with a coat daubed with many virtue words when we were in Tooting and Balham, which was where we ended going. They said things like Just Be Real and Be Kind, exhortations to virtue. Pretty unbearable too, I find. You would expect modern people to be paragons of niceness these days, wouldn’t you? I assure you, they are not.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com