Tag: random access memories

#oneaday Day 164: Random access memories

It’s peculiar exactly what memories your brain — or, well, more accurately, my brain — chooses to hold onto. One would think that your most “sticky” memories would be those that were defining influences on you; those which played a key role in shaping you into the person you are today. But I find that very difficult to believe when I contemplate some of my most vivid memories from years gone by.

For example, I vividly remember one lunchtime at primary school, my friend Matthew and I went to the rear of the school fields and did shoulderstands because we thought it would make us more likely to fart. I will freely admit that as a 43 year old man I still find farting far more amusing than I probably should, but I’m not sure that specific memory played a particularly developmental role in appreciating toilet humour. I haven’t done a shoulderstand for probably more than 30 years and I doubt I could right now.

I have several other primary school memories, and unfortunately not all of them are particularly positive ones.

I remember playing one lunchtime with a girl I was friends with; we were doing some sort of “pretend play” involving swordfighting using sticks, and my mother happened to walk by the back of the field during lunchtime (it was a public right of way) and saw this play, misinterpreting it as me hitting the girl in question with a stick. I got in trouble for that, despite me knowing very well that I was perfectly innocent.

I remember one P.E. lesson at primary school — very early, infants level, class 1 or 2 — where I really needed to go to the toilet, but I wasn’t allowed, and I ended up pissing myself in the playground. Rather than being embarrassed, I found it oddly fascinating how the piss would actually come out through my shorts.

Another P.E. lesson from the same “infants” period, so year 1 or 2, I somehow managed to shit myself without realising it. I didn’t notice until I got home and my mother asked why there was a brown stain on my arse. Genuinely not knowing that I’d actually shat myself, I suggested that I must have fallen in some mud at some point. The contents of my pants a little later revealed this to not be the case, though to my mother’s eternal credit, she simply made a comment along the lines of “it must have been some very strong mud to go all the way through your pants”. To this day, I genuinely don’t know how I shat myself without realising it.

Another time at school, again in the infants period, I felt sick during storytime, and yakked all over the floor. Once again, I found myself oddly contemplative about the experience rather than particularly embarrassed.

None of these experiences are what I’d necessarily call “formative”. I mean, yes, I have low self-esteem and I’m sure none of those particular events helped in the development of that particular personality trait, but I don’t think any of them were the root cause of it. Why do I hold on to those memories? They’re not particularly “precious” or anything, though at a pinch I might suggest that I hold onto them because recounting them as an adult is at least slightly amusing.

There are others from later years, too. I’ve recounted the tale of “not remembering how to make friends” on my first day at secondary school numerous times.

Then there was the time I overheard someone I thought was my friend taking the piss out of me while sitting behind me in the county concert band, and when I jokingly confronted them about it, not wanting to believe that they’d actually been being mean, and them not exactly denying it.

There was the one time I did step out of my comfort zone and introduced myself to someone at university.

The time I sat, all dressed up and ready to go out, brooding in the window of my hall of residence kitchen, hoping someone would find me and I could unleash the hormonal sadness I was feeling because the girl I liked had got with a guy from downstairs.

That one Halloween I felt an incredible sense of self-confidence and liberation after completely hiding my entire body and face. Another Halloween where I dressed up as a monk and ended up not being entirely sure if I’d scored with a girl or not, since she had taken me back to her house, let me in and given me her phone number, then just sort of vanished.

That one evening in grotty student nightclub Kaos where a random bloke asked me if I’d ever done ecstasy, then almost immediately afterwards I scored with a veritable Amazon of a woman (my friend Owen called her “Xena”, but her actual name was Beki) and the same bloke shook me by the hand, giving me a knowing wink and a smile, saying “yeah, mate, you’d definitely enjoy ecstasy”. (I’ve never done ecstasy.)

I could go on. There are myriad little snippets of my life that are lodged away in my long-term storage that I don’t really know why. I feel like these are the things that will flash before my eyes before I die, and I doubt I’ll be any clearer on the reason why they’re there at that point, either. Hopefully I won’t have to think about that for a while, yet.

I don’t really have a conclusion to these musings. I just think it’s interesting all the useless memories our brains seem to hold on to. If there is a reason for it, I don’t know what it is. Perhaps all those memories did shape me in some way and helped turn me into the gibbering wreck of a human being I am today. In which case… aren’t I better off forgetting all of them?

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#oneaday, Day 261: Random Access Memories

It’s weird, the things you remember over time. Perhaps it’s just me. But I’ve found over time that I have a fantastic memory for completely pointless crap and yet I can quite easily forget the things I need to buy from the shop in the space between stepping out of the house and reaching said shop.

So I thought I’d share a few stupid memories today for no apparent reason. I have hundreds of these. So this topic may return at some point in the future. For today, I’m going to focus on memories from my childhood.

First up: the ad starting at 2:17 of this vid right here:

Phurnacite. I’m still not entirely sure what it is, or was. But I remember this advert freaking me the fuck out when I was little despite, I believe, only ever seeing it once. Watching it now, it’s completely laughable, overacted and utter nonsense. For the longest time, I couldn’t even remember it was something to do with cookers. I remembered the image of the “doctors” with the masks on, though, and the woman crying going “HOW WILL I FEED MY FAMILY?”

Why do I remember that? That holds absolutely no benefit to me whatsoever unless taking part in a particularly specialist pub quiz on the subject of TV adverts from Christmas 1989 that freaked me the fuck out.

On a related note, the magazine advert for Mindscape’s surgery-em-up game for the PC, Life and Death, also featured doctors in masks, bloodstained swabs and the like and also freaked me the fuck out. I have never been in hospital for an operation, and those adverts were the reason I was terrified of the prospect of ever having to do so. Disappointingly, Google Images has let me down on an actual picture of said advert. But it was in an issue of A.C.E. magazine. Which was 1) possibly the best multi-format magazine of all time, now sadly defunct and 2) the only games magazine I’m aware of that rated games out of 1,000.

At some other point during my childhood, another completely random memory I have is to do with visiting the chap who was my best friend at the time. We’d acquired some weird little toys called “Wiggly Gigglies” (yes, laugh it up, it was the 80s) and much to my chagrin, friend in question had acquired a glow-in-the-dark one. I was fascinated by the idea of a glow-in-the-dark anything at the time, so one or both of us decided that it would be a really fantastic idea to lock ourselves in his airing cupboard to see that luminousness at work. Unfortunately, the airing cupboard wasn’t really big enough to even fit two kids inside, so I ended up shutting two of my fingers in the door and it really fucking hurt. It didn’t break them or anything, but they were bleeding a bit. I went home shortly afterwards, and resolved never to do two things: touch a Wiggly Giggly again, and shut myself in an airing cupboard again.

In that case, the pain is probably the trigger to the memory. But as I kid, I hurt myself quite a bit—kids will be kids and all that. It’s strange how that incident in particular sticks in my mind.

Let’s cap this off with a third memory. What I like to call The Great Injustice. It was lunchtime at primary school, and I was enjoying a game with a girl called Anna with whom I had something of an off-on-off-on friendship in that way primary school kids do. Particularly kids of the opposite sex.

I forget the exact details of said game, but it involved swordfighting. Or rather, stick-fighting. Our school field had a number of big trees on it, and they often dropped decent-size sticks that were great for mock swordfights. And so it was that Anna and I were staging some sort of battle for some reason. It was fun. Lunchtime ended and we went inside.

When I got home that evening, I got absolutely bollocked. Turns out my mother had been wandering past the school field at the time we’d been playing our game, at a point when I’d evidently been “winning”. As a result, I found myself in a lot of trouble for “hitting a girl with a stick”. And no amount of protestation could convince my parents that it had, in fact, been just a game, and if you talked to Anna she would back up my story. Because, after all, who believes the screeches that come out of the mouth of an eight-year old when they’re in trouble?

Hmm. These aren’t terribly positive memories, are they? Perhaps I should make more of an effort to remember things that didn’t freak me out or make me incandescent with an eight-year old’s rage!