Tuesday 16 April 2013

Round and Round in my Head

It's been a funny week. And not particularly funny ha-ha. I had a pre-op medical to set getting a new knee in motion. Only a problem came to light. My heart seems to have some sort of murmur, irregularity, not evidently present a couple of years ago. Strangely enough my wife has always maintained I stop breathing in my sleep (sleepacchnia). Scary stuff. So what happens next; You tell me!
This getting old malarky is a bit of a drag at times. You spend most of your time visiting doctors, dentists or hospital.  So much to do, so much to remember. Do you have nights where you lie in bed with a million and one things on your mind; I'm not the only one surely. And that leads to even more things going round and round!
I have always, always believed that everything that you've always experienced is still in your mind, right until the day you die. The difficulty is in recalling it, in any meaningful way. It took me years to recall my e-book (A Childhood Revisited) and that only covered fifteen years. I reckon I could do another but I haven't the heart. As an experiment last week I lay in bed and recalled anything that came into my head. The following surfaced:
My motorbike TNU137  1957
Derby County playoff versus WBA at Wembley 2007
Ruby Murray, who I reckon sang down her nose. My first love. 1955 (Softly, Softly)
Mundesley school camp in 1953
Little Miss Muffet junkets. Around 1950
Grannies funeral, the snow howled down at the graveside, just like a scene out of Dickens.  1978
A real football, one up on the rich kids, courtesy of an uncle in Derby.   Around 1951
Arriving on Chesterfield station to a new job, very reminiscent of High Noon.  1965
I started to wonder how much could the mind actually store. Stephen Hawkins reckons it can store 10,000 Oxford Dictionaries. Somewhere else I read it can store one trillion gigabytes of memory. I've studied it a bit but it soon loses me when it starts talking about petabytes and synapses. Some clever devils suggest the brain can grow with how much it NEEDS to grow! Thats a bit convenient, surely!
This all gets a bit deep but its partly an age thing I suspect. It all gets a bit personal when you reach seventy!
So many, many things to ponder. I wonder why we have spells of going round and round and spells of comparative 'sanity'. If I was mad, would I know I was mad or would I need someone to tell me? Here we go again. As Arthur English used to say 'Play the music! Open the cage!

6 comments:

Elliot Sampford said...

Another enjoyable, thought provoking posting. Your mention of your possible sleep apnea and the increased difficulty in recalling memories in our later years reminds me of a posting on my weblog in January of this year entitled: Poor sleep in old age prevents the brain from storing memories .

Sueann said...

Getting old is definitely not for the faint of heart.
Best you can do...enjoy the time we have and keep moving!
Hugs
SueAnn

Valerie said...

It's how amazing how lucid the mind is when it should be sleeping. Enjoyed this post, Ken, because I relate so well to it...lol.

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