Oh dear.
Over the years I have been used to and have become reconciled to the fact that most people’s names just don’t sink in when I am introduced to them. Within half an hour I am trying to frame conversations with them and their associates in such a way that they offer up their names. Eventually, most names sink in, but if that person then drops out of my personal sphere for a few weeks I am often back to square one.
I think the most embarrassing piece of forgetting was about 25 years ago. For a period, my then current band of cronies and I were thick with some US exchange students who were spending the Winter term (semester?) at Richmond American College in Kensington. Of course, after about six weeks they all disappeared home and despite protestations of friendship in those pre-internet days, contact was lost instantly, never to be regained.
Except for Steve.
Steve was a Philly boy and after graduation he came back to London for a spell before getting a career. We met him unexpectedly in the Builders’ Arms our pub of choice in those days and caught up on the news of the people we’d known over the previous Winter. Then came the point where it fell to me to introduce him to someone and as usual, though this time I remembered his first name, I had no idea which of the Padelvskis, Bronowskis, O’Reaordans, Montanas or Montoyas he was. After some humming and hawing on my part, he reminded us all, giving me the withering glance reserved for social morons, that his name was Stephen Smith. I had forgotten one of the most common names in the English-speaking world.
Of course, nothing changed. I generally still can’t remember names at all within ten minutes of an introduction, where I am being introduced to more than two people. I’m OK with two names: my brain sorts things out into categories: “individual, pair or couple, thronging multitude”. It gives up on and dismisses entirely, “thronging multitudes” of three or more.
Despite that, I have always been good at faces. I may not remember the names, but I recognise the faces, so I know we’ve met. I have spent a large part of my life trying to tie names to remembered faces and generally I get there in the end.
Now, however, I am finding an increasing incidence of cases where complete strangers greet me with obvious knowledge of both my face and name and proceed to pick up and run with conversations they clearly had with someone else entirely somewhere I’ve never been.
Either it’s a huge practical joke or I am going senile in my advancing years. I think it’s a joke, so hands up who organised it?
You! Whatsisface at the back? Stop giggling, man. Was it you, whoever you are?
