Sylvia and I have been worried for some time that our minds were on the way out. This morning on our walk, suddenly distracted by a dog incident, I forgot what I'd been telling her. The tragedy was that I knew, on a profound level, that it was something vitally important. What could it have been? Sylvia hadn't a clue either. We were in despair, both having big blanks where we should have had sharp and perceptive thoughts.
What did the future hold? Luckily for us, Sylvia's daughter works in mental health. Our best hope was that she might secure us both a place in the same locked ward. Imagine how despondent we were, because I've mentioned all this before: the memory going down the drain, the hours spent roaming the house, staring at cupboards, wondering why were we here or there and what did we want? But now it's getting worse. Complete blank-out is looming.
Or it was, but now we may have a reprieve. We are not going bonkers, we just have a new disease: age activated attention deficit disorder - AAADD - Rosemary read about it in a magazine. You know the one. Fielding has it too: last week he turned on the bath, but then a chum rang up about the footer, then the post arrived, news of a giant overdraft, he rang the bank, then heard a worrying dripping sound, ran upstairs, bathroom flooded, ran downstairs for the mop, which was by the drier, which was still full of clothes, which he forgot to empty last night, but then it was QPR v Burnley, and that is how the days whizz by. Poor Fielding is knackered, has been on the go for hours, and achieved nothing.
But it makes all the difference, of course, that our condition has a name, we know that we have it and we can remember that we can't remember. So we plod on, chatting about current events, like normal people: satanic abuse, delinquents, on-the-spot fines, Ruth Kelly giving sex offenders the benefit of the doubt. "That's a typical Tory response," snaps Rosemary.
"But Ruth Kelly's Labour."
"So she is," says Rosemary, who has been distracted by her four-month sojourn in Argentina and quite forgot we have a Labour government. To Rosemary, for a moment, the Blair years were a blank. Who said AAADD was an illness?
