As time goes by | 25 January 2018

If you were to ask me by the end of the week what I had written about in this column at the beginning I would probably look blank, fumble desperately through a foggy recollection of plays, news items, snatches of interviews and then reply, ‘I’ve no idea.’ This business of forgetting so soon what was once so clear in the mind is, says Francis O’Gorman in this week’s The Essay on Radio 3 (produced by Lisa Needham), very much part of our modern world. Too much information to take in, too little time to process it. The result, too much forgetting.

It’s virtually impossible to remember what you once put down as ‘your favourite meal’ on an online shopping site. Almost guaranteed that you will forget to take the only thing you really need for a train journey, your ticket, when you’ve also got to gather up a bag, key, wallet, laptop, phone, umbrella and noise-cancelling headphones for use in the ‘quiet’ carriage. So much stuff. Not only that. We’re encouraged all the time to think ahead, make a plan, update and innovate. Are we, asks O’Gorman, privileging the future over the past and thereby devaluing and demoting our memories?

Dostoevsky, he revealed, once wrote in a letter to a friend that he had recently read through his own novel Crime and Punishment. Two thirds of it was completely unfamiliar to him. He had written an unforgettable story about remembering (Raskolnikov working through his guilt) but forgotten most of it himself.

One of those snatches of conversation that I won’t forget in a while (I hope) is Christina Lamb, the foreign correspondent, talking to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs (produced by Cathy Drysdale). It was extraordinary to realise that Lamb was just 21 and fresh out of Oxford when she was taken on by the Financial Times to report back from the Afghan border.