Who can be surprised that dementia clinics are bombarded by the worried well? The warning signs issued by the Alzheimer’s Society are unsettling for anyone in middle age.
“Struggle to remember recent events”? I write down every damn thing immediately or I may never summon it again. “Find it hard to follow TV programmes”? I began the new series of House of Cards realising I’d forgotten how Kevin Spacey became president and the names of most principal characters.
Even more unnerving is the film Still Alice in which Julianne Moore plays a woman in the early stages of dementia who bolsters her fading memory with her iPhone. But where is the line? Nora Ephron noted the “senior moment” has been replaced by the “Google moment”: at dinner, instead of trying to recall a forgotten movie star’s name, we just hit the 4G.
Certainly the internet is becoming the mobility scooter of my mind. I know that if I engaged my grey matter a tad harder, I’d produce that tip-of-my-tongue fact. But instead I reach into my pocket, my smart phone making me daily more dim.
Deadly allure
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Sex or death: which is more interesting? The Wellcome Collection, in central London, has two brilliant exhibitions at the moment; one on the history of forensic science, the other on academic research into sexuality.
We did death first and were stunned by every exhibit: the Nutshell Studies dolls’ houses, created by the eccentric heiress Frances Glessner Lee to depict crime scenes in minute detail; the mobile morgue used after mass atrocities, such as in Bosnia; shards of skull showing a gunshot’s entry and exit wounds. Creepiest of all were photographs of homes taken decades after crimes occurred; once sprayed with phosphorescent powder, the spattered blood was still there, indelible horror.
Afterwards we did sex. There were clips of orgasm-monitoring by Masters & Johnson, early Victorian vibrators that looked like kitchen whisks, and I enjoyed flicking through Marie Stopes’s classic Married Love, in which she describes a woman almost crushed to death during sex because her husband refused to take weight on his elbows.
But, as we walked out and saw that a long queue had formed outside the forensics exhibition, we agreed with the public view: death is more fascinating than sex.
Green groan
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I bought a diesel car to be a good Green — and get a reduced road tax. Now it seems that although my battered but highly fuel-efficient Renault produces less carbon monoxide it belches out even worse nasties, such as nitrogen dioxide. Should I sell it? I’m sure it’s worthless now that it faces higher congestion and parking charges thanks to Britain’s about-turn on the benefits of diesel. A generation of cars bought for eco-friendly purposes may end up scrapped: how very sustainable.
And I will be sad to lose such a plucky car. In an act that should feature on the Alzheimer’s Society list, I filled it with eight litres of unleaded petrol before I remembered and topped it up with 32 litres of diesel. I drove home gingerly and asked Twitter what I should do. The replies ranged from “your car is dead” to “have the tank drained for £150”.
But then I read that while putting diesel in an unleaded engine is fatal, the other way around isn’t so bad. So I did nothing. The car is fine. Though now I’ve written this, it will probably conk out on the A12.
iGeneration
After reading Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about how an ill-judged internet remark can blight your whole life, I tried to give it to my sons. They shrugged. They know this stuff already: their friends only tweet under disguised names to avoid potential employers tracing them, they rarely post on Facebook, their settings are max-privacy. The young understand this world into which they were born better than us.