Simply Sue: Memories Are Made Of Old Oppressed Octopuses
Memory is an odd thing, says Sue Papworth in this gloriously funny column. But memory aids are odder by a mile...
Why is it that you can remember that the chief of police of Omaha, Nebraska, is called Dixon Gribble, but you can’t remember the number of your own car?
Quizphiles can tell you that the largest living creature on earth is the Blue Whale, otherwise known as Sibbold’s Rorqual. the Sulphur Bottom Whale or Balaeonoptera Musculis, but not where they’ve left the back door keys.
Memory is an odd thing. But memory aids are odder by a mile.
I never quite grasped the sure-fire method people keep on telling you about, where you remember a sequence of things by imagining them twined about various other things. You know the one “Oh, it’s easy, you just remember that One is a Bun and Two is a Shoe, so you imagine the first one on the list is eating a bun, whilst chatting to the second one who’s living in a giant shoe, and…’’
Good grief, if I could remember all that, I could remember the street plan of the planet Jupiter!
I did rather better with my mnemonics - those handy little verses. Like:
“In nineteen hundred and forty-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
If it had been in fifty three
He would have sailed the boundless sea…’’
But then, I could only remember that Richard of York Gained Battles In Vain by working my way through the colours of the rainbow. (I tended more to mumble Richard the Third Slew the Small Princes, which gives you Red, Tangerine, Sepia, Sepia, Plum, which isn’t half as pretty.)
One I always remembered is
“It’s perfectly easy to remember the date of Easter if you simply do recall,
That Easter on the first Sunday following the full moon immediately after the Vernal Equinox doth fall.’’
It’s the rhyme that does it.
But one useful thing that has been fixed in my brain since schooldays is the Cranial Nerves of the Dogfish, which have been a great comfort to me ever since. I know you’ll be agog to learn that they’re Olfactory, Optic, Occulomotor, Pathetic, Trigeminal, Auditory, Facial, Abducens, Glossopharangeal and Pneumogasttic. Or as we in the trade have it, Old Oppressed Octopuses, Please Take A Flag And Go Past.
I’m sure you will never forget it. But you’re on your own with the door keys.
