Old Photographs

Well, the wet and windy weather continues, though it seems we may get a bit of a breathing-space from tomorrow.  To be honest, Welshpool has not come through too badly, compared to many other places in the country. We've had our share of flooding, which is only to be expected, lying as we do firmly in the valley of the Severn, but it certainly could have been worse, and has been in other years. Quite a few trees have come down, though - out and about yesterday and today there are many gaps in the hedgerows and along the skylines.

I've spent quite a lot of time today sorting through old photographs, and putting a bit of a collection together for Mum's special birthday party tomorrow. Memories come flooding back! Sometimes there is a very vivid recollection not just of the place but of the exact moment when I see my seven or eight year old self in grainy black and white. Not that that is always the case; some of the photographs stir very little in the way of memories. Mostly these are more recent photographs than the childhood holiday snaps. Sometimes what Ann recalls is very different from my memories (shades of Maurice Chevalier!). Sometimes neither of us can remember very much. One picture shows all my brothers, my sister, our wives and partners, and Mum; it's taken after dark in the garden of a fairly modern house. Whose, I don't know; what the occasion was, I don't know. I must have been there, but no memory at all is stirred, and Ann was quite surprised to find herself in the picture, too.

It is apparently not true that our brains work less well as we get older (apart, of course, from specific health problems that may occur). It's just that they contain so much information, so many pieces of memory, items of learning, that everything takes longer to process. This, I am informed, is a matter of scientific fact; it has been tested. All I can say is that so far, my own tests seem to suggest otherwise. Unless, of course, my mind has behaved like the digital computer on which I am writing this, and deleted data in order to speed up the essential processes and calculations. Anyway, someone else will no doubt remember what it was we were doing twenty or so years ago, when we meet up tomorrow. And as (I think) Albert Einstein said, the important thing is not that you should know a lot of things, but that you should know where you can look them up.