Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

exercise and a healthy balanced diet can help to do so, along with regular brain activity such as crosswords and sudoku. I am not a crossword addict and sudoku defeats me entirely; I must put my trust in writing novels and, maybe, this.
    Writing is not a problem, thankfully. The language arrives, the word I want. I have never much used a thesaurus, and don’t do so now. But here’s an odd thing – words remain biddable, but names do not. Names drop into a black hole – the leader of the opposition, that actor I saw last week, the acquaintance who comes up at a party. After a while Ed Miliband will surface, and I dance around the problem of the acquaintance by avoiding introductions. I’m not worried, because I know I’m not alone – my contemporaries all have the same complaint. But why names and not words? Nothing that I have yet read on the operation of memory or the function of the brain in old age has yet offered an explanation; answers in comprehensible detail, please. A friend says: it’s because we’ve known, and known of, so many people – we have name overload by now. I am aware that there is a condition that makes sufferers unable to remember the word they are after – aphasia; Kingsley Amis had some wry fun with it in his novel
Ending Up
. But the name difficulty seems to be generic, and I’m skeptical about my friend’s explanation.
    Writing survives, for me. Other pleasures – needs – do not. I was a gardener. Well, I am a gardener, but a sadly reduced one, in every sense. I have a small paved rectangle of London garden, full of pots, with a cherished twenty-year-old corokia, and two pittosporums, and various fuchsias, and
Convolvulus cneorum
and hakonechloa grass and euphorbia and heuchera and a
Hydrangea
petiolaris
all over the back wall (well, some of you will be gardeners and might share my tastes). It gives me much pleasure, but is a far cry from what I once gardened – a half acre or so that included a serious vegetable garden: potatoes, onions, all the beans, carrots, squash, you name it, the lot. All I can do now is potter with the hose in summer, and do a bit of snipping here and there, thanks to the arthritis; forget travel, what I really do miss is intensive gardening. Digging, raking, hoeing – the satisfactory creation of a trench for the potatoes, deft work with the hoe around a line of young French beans, the texture of rich, well-fertilized soil. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendor. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was – is – the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would
Iris stylosa
do just here? And what about sweet woodruff in that shady corner? Gardening defies time; you labor today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye. And I still have something of this, in my London patch; twice a year, my daughter takes me to a garden center for the seasonal splurge – the summer geraniums, the pansies for winter.
    An addiction to gardening is genetic, I believe. My grandmother gardened to the exclusion of almost everything else; my mother had the gene, and now my daughter has it too. A working musician, she acquired Royal Horticultural Society qualifications in spare time that she did not really have. I wish I had done that – I admire and envy her more informed way of gardening.
    All the discussion of how to confront old age focuses on physical and mental activity. We must not subside into the armchair and pack up; we should go for a brisk walk every day (hips and knees permitting), we should reach for the crossword, pick up a book. There is much said about attitude, too. Those who had a positive attitude toward old age when in their fifties and sixties have