I woke to hear a discussion on the radio about ageing and memory: it wasn't so much that older people forget things, someone was saying, more that they have so much information in their heads that it gets muddled up and hard to access.
Yesterday in the office I'd tried to find some information about a company I'd bought something from last week. But I couldn't remember the name and had left the receipt on my desk at home.
I tried the name Nixon, which I thought it might have been.
This morning, I picked up the receipt and found the name was Hague.
I wondered why I'd made that particular mistake. Was it something to do with David Nixon, the children's magician I used to watch on television?
I soon realised it must be because Al Haig was Richard Nixon's right hand man during Watergate. I'd enjoyed the book All the President's Men, probably when it came out in 1974 - 37 years ago.
The connection was still there, evidently, even if only a kind of an auditory memory, since I'd got the spelling wrong.
Freud might have been onto something.
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