The corners of my mind

Happy Birthday to my brother Kenny who is... erm... something today. I can't remember. What age is he? I've completely lost track. Wait a minute, there's two years between each of us which would presumably mean he is 27. I think. I hit the grand old age of 31 this year so he must be 27, Lynsey in the middle being 29... ah, but he was born in 1983 so he must be 26. This is worrying. Not only are my siblings getting scarily old around me but I am suffering early memory decline and dementia. It's not the first time I've had this moment of realisation. A few weeks ago I was prompted to remember something that happened way back in primary school and I realised I could barely remember anything that happened in Art School, never mind High School and Primary. Is this normal? If not, I'm in trouble. Friends from school and college have often started a conversation with 'Remember when...?' and I embarrassingly have to pretend I remember, hoping they're not making some crazy, ridiculous occurence up in order to catch me out. Worryingly I've found myself in, and quite often caused, quite a lot of crazy, ridiculous situations so it's a pretty safe bet nodding my head and agreeing with some fake laughter. Kenny probably has more than a few of his own embarrassing memories of me kept instore for his best man's speech. Memories which will no doubt be used to laugh at me rather than with me. Primary school has to be the hardest of all the memory centres to dip into. The occasional funny moment springs to mind such as the Tambourini paper towel eating incident and other such wonders like the eating of sock elastic and pulling it back out through the nostril (something, I hasten to add, I did not take part in). Chaz's leap to sickening freedom, Colin's mass saying, playing Blinds Man Buff with a blind person, acting out Star Wars scenes in the schoolgrounds and the footie game in which I got belted in the balls with a Mitre Delta. Okay, I'm now remembering more of the stupid stuff rather than the stuff that actually matters such as my best grades, my timestables and my brother's age (though being hit in the groinal region should probably matter to some extent to any bloke - no matter the age). Perhaps I'm also exaggerating about the timestables. I do remember most of them and even sing them sometimes in my head, in the strange, ritualistic way we were taught (sometimes it takes ages to work something out when your standing in the middle of a supermarket). Primary school was torture a great deal of the time so this would perhaps account for the lack of memories. Perhaps I've deliberately shoved all the bad memories to the back of my head, under a psychological rug. A particularly heavy psychological rug which is rarely moved to hoover under for fear of the memories being set free and running wild in the brain. Perhaps some other memories have been mistakenly swept under the rug and in order to find the one you need you have to trawl your way through all the bad memories. In order to solve the Kenny's age problem I'll just use the most obvious solution and ask him. He won't mind. He barely remembers anyone's birthday and he's only... what... 27?