Brain-rot sets in

My mother started developing dementia when she was around 80. Not Alzheimer's, but the kind of dementia you get when your arteries fur up and your brain isn't getting enough oxygen. Vascular dementia, I think it is called. She would ask for a cabbage in the off-licence and go to the butcher's for a bottle of whisky (and probably get it, knowing her butcher). It was confusion rather than outright memory loss. For exaample, she would get out some fish fingers to eat, remark that they were rather tough and not realise that she was supposed to have cooked them.

Like all people who have seen it, I fear it. And three days ago I downright terrified myself by being unable to remember a simple word. I had a splinter in my finger. I wanted to get it out. "Have you seen the..." I asked Mr Grumpy. "Seen what?" he asked irritably, because the poor thing has raging toothache in his top left wisdom tooth again. (And won't go to the dentist, but Mr G and his teeth are another story and a very long and ugly one, too, just like his tooth.) "The... you know, the things you pull things out with, like chin and eyebrow hairs," I said crossly, angry with myself for not being able to think of the word and madly stirring the old braincells into lumpy porridge..

In an insufferably patronising tone, he replied, "Last time I saw the TWEEZERS, they were on the shelf behind the scissors."

Tweezers! Of course! That was the word. How could I have forgotten? But then, when was the last time I used them? Six months ago? (Not having enough eyebrows left to merit plucking.) It wasn't a word I ever used in conversation. Can a word evaporate from non-use in just six months? If so, then why haven't I forgotten tampon? I haven't used one of those since my hsyterectomy in 1998!

It was a very scary moment and it has worried me sick ever since. Isn't this the kind of symptom you have to watch out for? Is this the beginning of the end? Will I soon have to go around wearing a label saying, 'If found, please return to...'?

This led me to wondering why we are not all chipped at birth, like cats and dogs are, with our name, date and place of birth and parentage. That way, those fraudsters who assume multiple identities and claim thousands of pounds in benefits wouldn't get away with it. And if they tried to remove or change the chip, some alarm would go off somewhere and inform the authorities. Smacks too much of 1984 and Big Brother? Maybe. But at least, in the (I hope distant) future, it might help me find my way back home, along with Rover and Fluffy and the tortoise from No. 49.