File me under “Philosaurus”.

Suddenly, I feel very ancient.  I spent time this evening being shown the finer points of a computer game on an I-Pad. My mentor was one of my great-grandsons, Harry.

 He is two years old.

Old Men Forget

I’ve always been chronically  absent-minded. There’s usually so much going on in my head that great wodges of it get spiked on the mental  ‘pending’ file – out of reach of the instant recall mechanism. I tend to forget stuff.  So sue me.

Susie, who is to pessimism what Michelangelo was to painting ceilings, and  habitually sees everything going on around her in the light of a hypothetical worst-case situation, is convinced that I’m sliding pell-mell into senile dementia.

But the good news is that I’m not going batty.  How do I know that? Because my GP, the admirable Dr Williams, told me so. She took me through the standard NHS Are-You-Turning-Into-A-Gaga-Old-Fart Test yesterday, (and I bet you didn’t know there was one) which I passed with flying (if slightly tattered) colours.

However, in this instance I can understand Susie’s concern.  When I went to see the doc some weeks ago for a general health check, she suggested we make an appointment to do the test aforementioned. Just in case. So we agreed a date and time, which she wrote down on a piece of paper for me, and when I got home I entered the details into the computer which rules my life, and told it to remind me a few days before the due date.

Which it duly did. But there was one small problem. Could I remember why I was going to see her? Could I buggery. Complete blank.

 “Suse” I said  “Why am I going to see the doctor on Wednesday? I can’t for the life of me remember.”

“That’s exactly why! Because your memory’s shot”  (the word “dickhead”, though unspoken, hung in the air.)

Unusually for me, I had no answer to that. 

Should have gone to Specsavers?

So – I’m Idly looking through the magazine shelves in Asda while waiting for Susie to put her lottery on (a triumph of hope over experience, but never mind) when an interesting looking title caught my eye along  at the far end of the rack. Great – I thought  - a new humorous mag in the Private Eye or Viz  genre. So I walked over to have a closer look, only to find that  it was about sitting on a river bank catching bloody fish

The title – Total Carp.