By Rosie Roche
About a year and a half ago, I lay awake at night, tears streaming down my face as I dug deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of reels about dementia. Strangers being forgotten by their families and friends, and strangers forgetting their families and friends. The thought terrified me to such a level that for just over a week I lived in a feverish state in which I wrote my ‘The Memory Bank’. It was as industrious and unromantic as it sounds. Before I went to bed, I would trace every moment I could remember from that day and write it down.
I fully expected to read it back and be bored by excessive details of the mundane. However, I was wrong. The document begins by delusionally declaring: ‘I need to wake up and revise tomorrow. But that is unimportant really compared to the story of my life […] I have started a hundred thousand diaries already with the very real intention of following through with it. This time will be different because I will.’ Naturally, ‘The Memory Bank’ goes on to span a period of precisely only 12 days, from the 31st April – 11th May 2023: the height of my A-Level stress. It contains 5441 words. It is utter chaos. I must have repressed this period of my life far more than I realised. In my mind, A-Levels had been full of hard work, certainly, but I also thought I was relatively calm and rational. Having read it, I can safely say I cracked a bit under the pressure. Here is an extract which is very telling of my fragile mental state at the time:
Monday 8th May, 2023
‘I needed to come home. I had gone days consistently on the verge of crying and it was very tiring. I tearfully ranted about Miss Toe [name changed] on the way home to my mum, who had given me a sandwich. I got home and tearfully said I needed a shower. My mum said I should come and do the chickens. I tearfully declined. She made me go anyway.
I stood for a moment watching my mum dig up a worm for Henrietta. I tried to convince Peggy to eat a potato. I then said I was going back up to the house to have a shower. My mum told me I might have to turn the hot water on, and I started crying.
I had soup and bread, and the best shower ever while watching the office. I felt amazing, I felt refreshed, and my dad came in, asked if I was ok, and I melted back into tears again.’
…
It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining read, at least for me. I wish I could stick to regularly writing a journal or diary, but I have always struggled to make good habits stick. For your own potential amusement, here is a further extract from ‘The Memory Bank’.
Some context first: Bob is a fat little ginger pony, Wiggle is a very stupid pug (which I call the Bug), Henrietta is a chicken (or was, RIP), and Agatha is my sister.
31st April, 2023
‘I went to let out the chickens and say hi to them properly as I hadn’t really introduced myself yet. The gate wouldn’t open until I shoved it really hard, then I gently swung it back behind me. It closed again. Turns out the chickens had been let out already. I was trying to stroke ‘Hen-rietta’ (note: change the hens’ names, Agatha is overestimating the funniness) and to my horror saw that Bob was casually walking into the garden. Despite my best roar to prevent him, he continued meandering along. I leapt up to open the door. It wouldn’t open. I pulled and pulled and pulled with all my might. No luck. Instead, I was forced to jump like some kind of kung fu panda, and flew over the whole fence, bouncing off the hen food thingy. Grabbed the first bucket I saw, full of dirty water. Emptied it. It was full of rusty nails. Legged it to the tack room. Grabbed a big handful of nuts. Lost my bucket. Stressfully hunted for my bucket. When I finally found Bob, I lured him back, but to my horror, Wiggle stood, blatantly willing to die in Bob’s path, and Bob was not about to stop for an animal with an arse for a face. He powered through. I repeatedly flung Wiggle away by the scruff of her neck while maintaining a grip on the bucket. I did it. But it was not all over yet. There was still a pile of rusty nails to pick up which had conveniently landed in a rotting pile of horse poo. So with the Bug on my lap, I hunted through horse shit for rusty nails. All of this to let out the chickens who were already let out.’
So, there was a time when a chicken called Henrietta was an unusually dear thing in my life… which I had forgotten. If I hadn’t written these random days down in such depth then she would have sunk into the vast ocean of forgotten details in my life. In all honesty, there will be a depressingly large forgotten ocean specifically for chickens which have tragically died over the years because of the fox. I have not forgotten the pug’s death wish however, which persists without explanation to this day. She repeatedly lunges into herds of cows and yaps at their feet as they trample around her, or dives under car tyres thinking she can halt them with her sheer bulk. Small but mighty (and with a short life expectancy due to her small brain). I digress.
…
I was lucky enough to have a gap year and was again determined for this period of my life not to be forgotten. In the dreary days of October when my local friends had already sauntered off to Australia, London or University, I still lurked in the countryside with the sheep in the mud and the rain, feeling sorry for myself. A friend’s father rather morbidly looked me in the eye and said – and I will never forget it – “You will remember these days of your life in colour… the rest of your life you will remember everything in black and white. Enjoy it. Appreciate it.” I did appreciate it and the memories are certainly colourful, and I now dread the day where my memory will fade to black and white- a very eerie thought. Anyway, these words first of all sent me bolting into London in search of ‘colour’ and to rather predictably work for F&M, and secondly, they were a motivating factor to start trying to write down my life again.
Although I did buy several small notebooks which are stacked in a neat little line on my desk, they are all either heavily written in throughout the first pages, or maybe half full at the most. I think this is partly because when I am writing something physically, I don’t really like to be brief, as it feels inaccurate. I always find myself writing diary-like things as if someone might come and read them one day, so the tone is like a one-sided-dialogue. They are long, drawling monologues which bang on about lots of little things – like a cat I saw in the morning, or a grape I ate in the afternoon. I inevitably get bored and give up. I ended up having a note (just in Notes) which bullet-pointed each day roughly. This is not time-consuming at all and works well because even if it’s not very detailed, you remember things from it. Some of them I returned to later and tried to rewrite in greater depth from memory.
My favourite way of writing down my memories though, which I began in August 2023, is to try and perfectly capture a single moment with as much vivid detail as possible – written in the moment itself. I normally try to write in a way that puts people reading it at as close proximity as possible to the same scene of my life. This is an impossibility, of course – one of the great troubles with writing is the inevitable incongruity of the memory of the author with the myriad of interpretative imaginations of their readers. Even the discord between public imagination and Hollywood imagination causes unimaginable irritation for everyone involved – nothing is more jarring to an adoring reader than watching a badly adapted book unfold on screen. The best adaptation of a book I have seen to date is Normal People – which I was amazed by, given that the nature of the book is so focussed on the mind; to express that on screen was an incredible feat. I also think it is an example of the book seriously lending to the experience of the film, as you know precisely what niche pocket of feeling the actors are attempting to portray. I digress…
Here are some extracts from my ‘Words, words, words…’ notes:
18th August, 2023
‘The window faced the sleepy sun which rested brightly right against the horizon, scattering shivers of yellow out into the sky. For a long moment the plane swivelled away, and when it turned back, the sun was gone and only its ripples of orange light remained. The sky dipped quickly from being glazed with sunset, to a smoky purple, to an ever deepening blue. Now the world outside is charcoal black, and having deliberately, stupidly, picked a window seat for the views, I find myself with my face pressed against the window to see past the reflections from inside. When you get close enough though, it is quite beautiful. The only thing to be seen in the darkness is the patterns made by people’s lights. Cities smattered the black with shifting gold, making a band of land look like it was smouldering, a burnt out piece of timber in the inky sea. Tiny bursts of light are towns. When they’re splattered across a large area, the ground looks like it’s been scoured by meteors which have left glowing ember debris. They’ve dipped the lights now, so the plane is soaked with orange-pink light, and now I can see the stars peppering the sky.’
Another one…
2nd March, 2024
‘The hills rise and ripple around us like a green tide, swallowing up the view of Mount Kenya. The wind whips and snaps at my hair and grey lakes loom from the grass lined with zebra and impala. Cows are herded across plains by men with colourful clothes and long sticks and the shrubbery expands and contracts with the shifting landscape like a murmur of forest-coloured birds.’
This one’s from Cambodia…
2nd May, 2024
‘The sea is lilac pink, and the sky is a soft raspberry rainbow of rippling clouds. Painted blue and white boats are scattered across the bay and the green arms of the island are extended out towards the mainland like a ballerina. The hostel is filling up, the BBQ burning away wafting the mouth-watering smell of steak across the sand. Zac’s knees knock together as he scrolls through Instagram, Kitty is plugged into her wire headphones and Ella lies on her side. Flags flap in an unfelt breeze. Purple UV lights over the bar. Waves lapping at the beach. Suki Waterhouse lilting in the background. This is tranquillity. Earlier we rented a paddle board and spent the afternoon burning in the sun, leaping, diving, flipping into the bright turquoise water before flopping over the board, faces tilted away from the light. It felt like perfect nostalgia if that makes sense. “You only realise you’re in the good old days when they’ve already gone”. Bullshit. I’m in them right now.’
This next one was on the final flight of my year off. Evidentially my thoughts had turned a bit darker at this point, as I seem to be picturing it crashing.
24th August, 2024
‘Suitcases rolling. Disembodied dolls heads lolling out of glittering backpacks. Identical blonde girls in identical dresses. Walking down the aisle, scanning for the seat number. It is as if I were walking through a real-life Guess Who. Different versions of blinking bleary-eyed faces watching me. 13C – not a window seat sadly. Soft roar of the plane. ‘Seat Belts please.’ You need to put your bag in the overhead as you’re on a wing exit. Reading the instructions above the window. Letting the mind drift. The plane jolts and hisses and the door flies off. The man with the weak bladder who earlier kept getting me to stand up: dragged out of the window. The clutter of yellow masks deployed and bouncing and swinging. Hands grabbing and missing and yanking the oxygen to their faces. I read once that the oxygen simply sedates passengers, making them giddy and happy during their last moments. The blue sky tilts. What would Byron or Wordsworth write if they knew we would one day commute through the intangible mountains of white cloud, in a branded cylinder hurtling through the air, somehow more stable and smooth than rolling on rails in a train. Sinking into the glow. So vivid, so glorious, so heavenly. It would give way to shadow and rain and muddy green and grey. England. Home.
The thud of wheels against tarmac. A familiar feeling now- how privileged is that? Tens of times. This time there is a sad finality to it. Already I want to fly away again. I can already see it coming. The murky ice of winter charging headlong towards me, even as the sun still presses a warm palm against the graffitied cheek of Bristol.’
Anyway, I feel I have subjected you all to enough of my random moments in life. Those were a few ways that I, an extraordinarily disorganised person incapable of writing a diary, have tried to battle oblivion over the last few years. Wilde once brilliantly wrote, in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train’. I wouldn’t call any of this sensational, but it is such fun (Miranda’s Mum).