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It never ceases to amaze me how the memory is activated by the tiniest
nudge. The other day was a prime example. My son was sitting at his table
in the living room, doing a pencil drawing of a triceratops, one of his
favourite dinosaurs. He made a mistake and, rather than go upstairs to
find his rubber, he went to the draw in the bureau and retrieved an old
rubber that had been long forgotten. I was catching up on my backlog of
New Scientist magazines when I heard him complaining that the rubber was
solid and wouldn't rub out the pencil marks that he wanted to change.
I went over to help, thinking that I would rub it hard on the surface
of his desk to remove the old surface |
and reveal the softer
rubber underneath. Before I got there, an important part of my teenage
life had flashed through my mind, leaving me with a sense of something
unfinished. The trigger for this was when I saw the blue and white striped
rubber that he had found. I knew immediately that on the underside was
the inscription "QUEEN RULE ROCK", written there one afternoon
in 1976 by...let's call her SJL. There are no prizes for guessing that SJL
was my first love. You don't even get a prize for suspecting that she
gave me the classic dump line about still wanting to be friends. You would
get a prize for realising, as I did when I saw the rubber, that I never
had the chance to fall out of love with her, and in a strange way I don't
think I ever will.|
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