First signs of dottiness

I read in a Sunday paper at the weekend that one of the first recognised signs of Alzheimer's was the inability to recognise when someone was being sarcastic. O dear. I have NEVER been able to recognise sarcasm. All my life I have been the unwitting victim of leg-pulls and wind-ups because I have failed to recognise the giveaway vocal inflections or body language. Like a child, I tend to take what is said to me seriously, at face value, and have often felt wounded when the person winding me up has collapsed into gales of laughter.

But today I had the most dreadful warning sign that my brain may have taken the slippery slope to wipe-out. I opened the bird feed bin and found, nestling on top of the peanuts, a half-finished jar of pasta sauce that I took out of the fridge several days ago to throw in the bin. The yellow rubbish bin, not the blue bird-feed bin. One is on the floor, the other is on the dresser. You'd think I'd know the difference.

When I saw it in there, a ghastly cold feeling swept through me and the words, 'You're going barmy' rang in my brain. After Mr Grumpy's various brain haemorrhages and strokes, he regularly had to retrieve his mobile from the freezer and the sugar from the fridge, but now I'm doing it, too, and I have no excuse other than... well, maybe a visitor suddenly walked in (Mr G leaves the front door on the latch when he's at home), or perhaps the phone rang, or... or maybe I really am losing the plot.