Paul

Anyway, yeah, I enjoyed that, that was lovely [laughs].

So, you played rugby while you were there then with the local team? 

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you want to tell me [laughs] about that? That sounds fun.

I can’t, I can’t, I mean it’s a long time ago.

Of course.

I would have been twenty-two, twenty-one/twenty-two yeah, and it was, it was a sort of real mixture, real melange, dare I use the word? A, a real mixture of age groups in the team, yeah, from; I suppose I was middle, middle, in the middle aged, not middle aged but in the group that were-

In the middle of the group?

Yeah, that order. Yeah, and I just, I just love. the general ambience of it was; there’s a, there’s a move called the scissors move in rugby, but I mean people believe that, that rugby’s not particularly skilled but there’s all sorts of skill levels develop in all sorts of jobs and roles aren’t there? I mean, and I learnt, I learnt the words for how to do scissors. You, you have to trap the person in; you will have passed the ball but you want to fox the opposition, yeah? So you, you, you cry, “Croiser, croiser,” which you’ll know is ‘cross’ and pass the ball behind you as that person runs behind you and takes the ball, thus fooling the opposition, you hope [laughs].

Right. So, you had to learn the calls in French obviously as well, yeah.

So, you were saying about writing things down; do you find that you do write things down more now to, or is it just still not something you bother about doing?

No, no. I always resolve that I’m going to write things down but the resolution, you know, I think what’s the point? [Laughter].

Well, if you write it down and you don’t go back and look at wherever you’ve written it then it…

I always try to, I always try to run my life with mnemonics of some sort, you know, but whether, I don’t know what, what really mnemonics are, whether they’re things you write down or whether they’re things you make a sort of a snag in the brain to sort of try, ooh every time I do that, I must remember to do so-and-so.

Yeah. No, it’s whatever, whatever works, isn’t it?

Yeah

So, have you applied any of these sorts of strategies to your current memory problems? 

No. To be honest, no sooner as I’ve thought about the need, thought about how I would do it, I’ve forgotten it again; and this is, I mean it’s laughable but [laughs] I’ve forgotten about it, you know, making copious lists of this, that and the other, it’s a waste of space because I’ll never look at them. Although I suspect that’s true of a lot of people’s note-taking, well maybe not what you’re taking [laughs] I don’t know [laughs].

And so, I think the U3A does lots of different sort of subjects don’t they?

Oh yeah, yeah, there’s a hell of a choice of things, you know, you can go to choirs, you can go, yeah, but they’re just, it’s just massively, the number of – but unfortunately the U3A is sort of, in [City] is kind of dwindling a touch. It got kicked, kicked into touch with Covid and the like because of people not being able to meet and in some places it hasn’t recovered, yeah. But slowly coming back to life, I do believe.

So, did they do things online or did they just drop it altogether?

Did things online, yeah; well, I still do some French, I do some French online now, and unfortunately [tutor]; what a name, eh? French name [laughs] she’s still frightened of coming together as a group, she doesn’t want to do it. Used to be, we used to meet in a church hall, but now she’s stopped doing that. And the numbers, there’s only, with [tutor] now, well last night there were three people, were there three? Yeah, me and two other, two other ladies.

Just that things that I feel I ought to be remembering I can’t pull them to mind and, phew, logical progressions can’t be sought in, you know, if you can’t find; well you know that, you know that to get from A to C you need to be, you need to know B but you, you, for the life of you can’t put it to mind what that ought to be. And in point of fact some, it’s difficult to explain it because I’ve now forgotten about it, and forgetting is, is the worst thing of all. And, and memories, I think, like I was saying earlier, memories, you can’t tell which memory is which; so, a memory of yesterday you might think that was, that’s, that was today, or vice-versa, yeah?

We did go, [wife] and I went to see some bloke across the other side of [City] but I don’t remember who he was now, and indeed it wasn’t until perhaps a week ago that [wife] reminded me that we’d seen this fella.

Ah that’s where we learnt about mild cognitive whatever it is.

Impairment?

Yeah [laughs] impairment. I find, I’ll have to, I’ll have to, M, mild, see I’ve already forgotten; MCI, is it known as MCI?

Sometimes, yeah.

I’ll have to remember it as MCI then, it, it’ll, then I’ll be forced to remember it, you know, like a crossword puzzle [laughs].

Yeah. So, so that was maybe?

That was about a year ago now and in the hope that what he might be able to advise would help my memory, but I’d just forgotten, to be honest, until recently I’d forgotten all about the fact that I ever went there. I don’t know whether, see I was always a keen do-it-yourselfer [coughs] always a, excuse me, always a practical hands-on sort of guy and, you know, when you’ve got things to think about like that you, you don’t have time to worry about your memory dissipating or sort of going do you?