6 things

1. I have a very good memory. I don’t feel as though I have a very good memory. I feel as though I am permanently teetering on the brink of Alzheimer’s. But common sense (and a steady stream of people exclaiming, "My God! Your memory is incredible!") dictates that this cannot be the case. Perhaps the reason why I don’t feel as though I have a good memory is because I am not shielded by a blissful layer of forgetfulness. Perhaps I can almost remember so many things that my sense of all the hundreds of things I have forgotten is almost as huge as the great stack of things I can recall: words from songs we sang in the infants, tunes from films, poems from school, lines from plays, conversations….

The conversations are the most irritating things to remember. You’d think people would be pleased – pleased – to be reminded of the things they’d said. Right?
Wrong. No one wants to remember what they said. No one wants to be consistent. Everyone would rather muddle along in a glorious cloud of instantaneous, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, playfulness. No one likes it when I say, in a petulant tone of voice, "But that’s not what you said last June…" I think this kind of accuracy should be applauded. Really, I am doing a public service. But I am the only one who thinks so. And I am learning to shut up.

2. I used to imagine that the trail that windscreen wipers left on the screen of my father’s car were the boundary disputes of two warring nations. As they went to and fro, back and forth, eternally crossing over the disputed territory in the middle, I saw each wiper as the advancing army of the nation, entering into the zone to take it over, only to retreat, and find the other wiper had quickly conquered it. I must have seen in the constant back-and-forth some kind of metaphor for the senselessness of ongoing hostilities, and the lifelong bitterness it creates. Or perhaps not. I was only about four.

3. I bite the inside of my lip. Not hard. I don’t break the skin. I just take a section of the inside and sort of gently hold it between my teeth. I don’t even chew. This is sounding odder as I try to describe it. Trust me. It’s sort of comforting. Like a hidden version of sucking your thumb.

4. This isn’t weird. But it is very important: I am impossibly greedy. I love to cook good food: chopping, blending and preparing all afternoon for a three course extravaganza with friends. I love big lazy breakfasts with buttery scrambled egg, croissants, and huge mugs of tea. I love chips eaten with your fingers in the rain. I love sweets: the more crazily full of e-numbers and powdered with sherbert the better. I love fast food, and slow food. I love ready-made food, and made-from-scratch food. I will always clear my plate. Missing a meal is anathema to me.

What all this means is I have never got up in the morning, tried on some clothes, and realised that I have just spontaneously ‘lost weight’. Weight does not fall off me: it has to be sweated and starved off. Then it retreats, to just around the corner, waiting until I relax, waiting to jump and cling again, ever more persistently. What is weird is that the amount I care about my weight is in inverse proportion to how much I weigh. When I was a teenager, and considerably thinner than I am now, I constantly obsessed about being obese. Now, fatter … well, let’s say larger… than I have ever been in my life, it doesn’t really bother me so much. I think there are several reasons for this: one is that I have enough money to dress well, and I do truly believe that wearing clothes that fit you is one of the things that makes people look better than almost anything else. The other is that my life is so good compared to how it was when I was a teenager: I have Jack, I have a great job, we have a lovely house (I don’t have spots anymore. Well, not regularly). I have lost weight in the past: it’s not complicated, it’s just incredibly boring. So I think if it was that important to me, I would do it. And I haven’t. So there must be more to life.

5. When I was around twelve, I visited the dentist, who told me cautiously that my teeth had a slight tendency to stick out, and I should be careful not to let them rest in front of my top lip, in case I would need a brace.

I don’t know what possessed me. It must have been the attention. Perhaps some adolescent delusion. Whatever it was, and it seems incredible to me now, I resolved that a brace I would have, and from that moment forward my teeth never rested anywhere other than in front of my lip, Bugs Bunny style. In my defence, it must have only taken a little while before it became habit… at least I hope so. So, of course, I was given a brace: a horrible plastic mouth-shaped insert with crazy insect-leg style bits of wire to hold back and move my teeth around. It hurt like you wouldn’t believe, made me lisp, and generally was the bane of my life for a year and a half. So be careful what you wish for.

6. My nose pops. I have never met anyone else whose nose does this. It’s hard to describe, but try to imagine this: the tip of your nose is made from rounded cartilage. Imagine if that cartilage was so rounded that, if you pressed the side gently with a fingertip, it would indent and then pop back out again. Rather like one of those dome shaped plastic cracker – toys that you turn inside out, then leave on the floor and as it turns itself back the right way, it jumps in the air.

I’m making this sound very odd. It’s impossible to see. You certainly can’t hear it (it’s endearingly weird. Not freakish). But you can feel it against your finger if you try hard enough.

Go ahead. Scoff. But I used thisas a surprisingly successful chat-up line when I was into the kind of drunken parties where everyone ended up snogging.

Ok. That’s it. I’m not tagging anyone. But if you haven’t done it yet, then you know who you are!

With love,

therumtumtugger

xxx