Times Lost and Found

Down Southwark way the Bish, it seems, is still proclaiming he cannot recall the night of recent events and that whatever the truth his being drunk was not a part of it. Tricky, of course, if one has no recall to be so certain, but then proving a negative never was easy. Bish Butler points to strong circumstantial evidence - personal history of sobriety, ability to travel by public transport - as backing his thesis, though one gathers the police are maintaining yet their stance that a mugging as such is not the matter in hand.

Can't blame the fellow above all for being concerned about the amnesia. Tests of a neurological sort are, we are told, being carried out and one hopes naturally that there is no lasting damage to the mitred head or the grey matter therein.

For myself, I have one such recollection of an amnesiac moment - some lost hours - following a failed teenage stunt on a bicycle. We lived atop of a steep hill and the stunt was to attempt to cycle to the bottom without using one's brakes during the descent.

That, on this occasion in question, I failed in the enterprise altogether is clear from my waking in a hospital bed with a heavily bandaged face and torn shoulder. To this day though I have no memory of the doing of the thing, which - according to witnesses - involved me losing control on a sharp bend, flying over the handlebars and landing, face first, on the road. (Lucky indeed - and later much thanked by me - these persons were present to summons an ambulance in the first instance and my parents in the second.)

According to the medics, the shock and pain of the moment of impact was too much for my emotional and psychological memory to bear and - with the help of not a little concussion - the cerebral slate was wiped clear of the whole event. Boy starts descent, boy wakes in hospital - the rest is a perennial blank.

What though the boy does recall as a man was the moment of waking in hospital to be greeted by an intolerably jovial nurse enquiring how were "we" feeling. Temper sharpened by the severe pain, my response was to utter a string of profanities and oaths of a personally intimate nature, the main thrust of which being that howsoever fine a fettle the nurse might be in, I was far from well and in deep distress. So could the nurse kindly 'F Right Off' and leave me in such peace as my pain would permit.

She, of course, being made of stern professional and charitable stuff, did not take over much offence at my rebukes, merely pressing on with an offer for us to have "our" injection. Once again this notion that she and I were somehow partners in the experience of my individual agony was too much to take and more oaths ensued - to no effect of course as the needle shot into my arm with no further by or with one's leave.

The soothing drug taking near instant effect I began at once to drift back off into unconsciousness, pausing only then to notice Ma and Pa sitting either side of my bed with looks of equal parental anguish at my plight and embarrassment at the words they had not known lay within my linguistic store.

Was more than ten years before I had the nerve to mount another bicycle and I never did find that half a tooth left embedded in the tarmac, despite hours of hunting for it as a trophy and as necessary aide memoire.