Walking back home from Narai Thai, noticing the tangle of overhead power cables, suddenly brought back a vivid memory from my early childhood, when I would pretend the telephone wires were giant spiderwebs and equally giant spiders were hiding just out of sight ready to pounce if you strayed too near. A seemingly obscure memory, but it just brought home to me how much my imagination has declined with age. Has an entire adulthood of strictly following policies, guidelines and evidenced based practice sapped any ability for original thought from my brain. But it's not just my imagination that is suffering with age, my memory is also far from what it used to be. Back in my school days I could sit in class barely paying attention and I would absorb all the necessary information like a sponge, revision was completely unnecessary for me. I would learn all my lines for a play in one night while sitting in the bath, lines I can still recite to this day:
"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And 'ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion."
So why is it that now I struggle to remember the simplest things? I am thinking it must be a combination of both these factors that has left me in my current state of poor performance in job interviews.
Another of our fish died this weekend, poor Lili succumbed to a fungal infection, we had just started treatment when we noticed the furry white mould appear under her left gill on Saturday morning, but by Saturday night she was belly up. Lilo and Lila are still doing fine.
