Authors Electric

Some of you may have noticed I forgot to do my last two blog posts, so I decided I had better start writing this before I forgot the topic altogether. I have reached the grand old age of seventy-three, and my short-term memory is now rubbish. I have a lot of friends of a similar age, and they are finding exactly the same thing. The decline seems to start around seventy. I flagged this up to a doctor a few years back, and his response was “People of high cognitive ability notice small changes earlier than others. Stop worrying.” A nice compliment, but not much help really. I frequently find myself in a room, wondering why on earth I went in there in the first place. Most distressing is not being able to remember what word I want – and yet, once in the front of the computer, I seem to have no trouble at all. It’s speech, I think. If I need to remember something I say it out loud, and I remember the sound of the word. Writing it down helps too, because it could be that I remember the tact...