Blah Blah Flowers

I used to be quite confident in my memory. Not so much that I remembered everything that ever happened to me or that I'd heard, but that it was black and white, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, I was confident that there were just things I knew I knew and things I knew I didn't know any more. But after going back to Catford in June and realising that the memory I had of where my Nan had lived was completely wrong I'm now starting to wonder about how reliable the rest of my memory is. I recently heard that someone I went to school with, Stuart, died several years ago when he came off his motorbike and smashed his head against a concrete bollard. He lived round the corner from me when we were growing up and went to the same schools as me until I was twelve. Then our paths seperated and I never really saw him again. But there were those weekends and summer evenings when all the kids in the street would play footie or ride on their bikes and we knew each other well enough that we'd go round each others houses. However I now find I cannot remember at all what he looked like when we used to play. Or any of his four brothers. And it's odd that he's gone, because I can remember the other kids who used to play with us and what they look like.

And that's the known unknowns. I wonder what the unknown unknowns are?

Labels: personal history