In one of the places where I get my prework coffee, a woman waved at me. “You look lovely,” she said.
I thanked her and said she looked lovely too.
She fell back into conversation with the woman beside her while I set about the coffee-ordering process.
The thing was: she had said it in such a familiar way that it seemed as if we knew each other; and her appearance somehow bolstered that impression. She hadn’t rolled out of bed and thrown on a tracksuit. It was the morning, but she looked like she could be on her way to the theatre or to meet an international dignitary or to accept an award. She didn’t seem like the kind of person you’d forget easily.
READ MORE
Yet I couldn’t place her. Variations of this happen to me all the time. Because of my job, I tend to meet a lot of people. I’ve never forgotten a face (I think), but I am atrocious at names. More precisely, they don’t come back to me quickly. I’ll pass someone on the street who I might have been talking to the day before. They’ll greet me by name, but the best I can muster is a faux-enthusiastic Hi! I’ll recall the name eventually, but it might be minutes, or hours. Or days. I’ve never managed to devise a strategy to cover for this failing and I’ve probably offended countless people because of it. I’m sorry. Whoever you are.
Similarly, I’m easily thrown by context. If, for instance, I bump into one of the coffee shop workers outside the coffee shop – at an NCT inspection centre or a chip shop – I immediately know I know them, but I don’t know where from. We could be cousins or former lovers.
This is not a debilitating condition, more a quirk of my brain: and the human brain remains a wonderfully mysterious organ. We still don’t know why we think the way we think, why we remember some things but not others.
There are people I’ve interviewed several times, but on each occasion seem to have no memory of having met me before. (Which I choose not to be offended by). Sometimes, people say hello to me, but then look baffled as they quickly realise that they don’t know where they know me from. (People occasionally smile at me too. But that’s just the beard. When I first grew it, I was aiming for Sexy Fisherman. But it seems to have developed into Harmless Off-Duty Santa).
[ Seán Moncrieff: Time is slowly kicking the crap out of meOpens in new window ]
The difference with the woman in the coffee shop was that while it felt like I should know her – she acted like we’d met before – I didn’t recognise her. Her face wasn’t at all familiar. She didn’t look like she’d had Botox or a facelift. Perhaps she’d had Botox when we last met but hadn’t kept up the treatments. Or, more likely, this was a sign of dramatic cognitive decline. People completely erased from my memory. A sexy fisherman who can’t remember where he parked his boat.
But then the woman waved me over. Which I welcomed: when you can’t place a person, the first thing they say can often provide a clue. You still owe me €50, or do you remember that Turkish prison? Instead, she informed me that she had left her cigarettes at home.
This still left me baffled, so I made vague sympathetic noises. And then I noticed that the woman beside her – who I had assumed was her friend – was smirking with enjoyment. I had got it completely wrong.
We didn’t know each other at all. She was simply a bit of a character: a category of person whose unique brains add to the richness of life. The woman went on to inform me that she was 61. I told her she looked 25 and she howled with pleasure. I’ll remember her the next time. I hope.
