“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”  John Banville, The Sea.

Once again idle blogs are idling like a classic Bugatti; ticking over, but not forgotten. And it was forgetting what day it was yesterday, unless it was the day before, that caused me to think abut memory and it’s elusiveness. We struggle to recall so much of our lives, yet every stroke, blow and fall is recorded in the unconscious as easily as wooden tables trace and recall the words of biros and knife cuts.

Memory is what makes us who we are and has been a  focus of medical studies throughout history. In the first century, Pliny the Elder described a man who fell off a roof and afterward could not remember his mother, neighbours, and friends. It is unclear if Pliny pushed him or not in the name of science, nor if it was actually…