Subtotal Recall

I am always saddened by my complete inability to remember the following useful information:
- Gripping statistics;
- Historical dates and facts;
- Plots of books I’ve read and loved;
- Funny jokes;
- News articles I’ve read within the past few hours;
- The names of people’s family members;
- Birthdays other than my own and, randomly, Keanu Reeves’ (2 September);
- Quotations by worthy writers (one odd exception: the first two lines of Hamlet’s first soliloquy: ‘O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew…’ Of all the quotations that one might remember, that one must be among the more ditchable).

I do, however, appear to have a limitless capacity for recalling:
- Irrelevant statistics;
- Unfunny jokes;
- Obscure Simpsons characters;
- What I had to eat in almost every restaurant I’ve been to in the past five years;
- Eighties and nineties pop and rap lyrics (and by rap I mean Partners in Kryme’s Turtle Power and Boom (Shake The Room) by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, not Straight Outta Compton).

Disappointingly, after five pitiful entries, I am already struggling with the second list. And despite my absolute failure to remember a single beautiful quotation from any book or play I’ve read or studied, there are a few phrases that always come back to me. Exhibit A was proffered by my friend, Donald, who claimed: “A good driver would never be found at the front of a queue of cars waiting at a red light.” The implication here is that one should always have raced through the previous green/amber light rather than pulling to a halt. Exhibit B was spoken by my friend, Charlie, circa 1994. For some reason, he was sucking up to a cab driver and said, “They may not be the fastest cars, but black cabs will always be the first car off the red light.” And earlier this year, my friend, Duncan, claimed of himself: “Never knowingly overtaken while walking.”

All three of these comments are, arguably, slightly pointless and facile. But despite thousands, nay, millions of other pieces of superior knowledge jostling for brain space within my skull, these three nuggets pop up with disturbing regularity, Duncan’s almost twice daily as I’m beating a path through sluggish pedestrians on the 60 metre dash between the bus stop and the tube.

It’d be so much easier if we could choose the contents of our own brains. Blimey, there’s a concept… I can see that spiralling into a Strange Days style futuristic horror movie where people greedily hoard knowledge, discarding ‘useless’ emotional memories and a world full of detached, heartless monsters is born… I don’t want to write it, but if anyone else does, I’ll sue.

PS. Jason Donovan wakes up in hospital. He turns to the nurse and says, 'Nurse, was I brought here to die?' and she says, 'No, you were brought here yesterday.' Smash Hits magazine, c.1991.