PORTSMOUTH: A JOURNEY BACK TO PERSONAL AND HISTORICAL PASTS

 

A MINI HOLIDAY UNDER THE SHADOW OF COVID19

Sunny and warm days were forecast for the whole week following a fortnight of miserable, cold and wet weather snap. We felt that we must take advantage of this dry break and take a holiday. The menacing pandemic is still simmering, the possibility of another lockdown, though small is always there. This threat of impending prohibition made the desire to enjoy this opportune freedom rather compulsive.

The complexities of choosing a safe holiday destination did not dampen the desire. Going abroad even to a nearby European destination needs a lot of organising and is riddled with uncertainties so we decided to stay in the country.

After considering a few places we finally chose the historic naval city of Portsmouth. It evoked a nostalgic feeling. I did my first job* there in in 1977 when I came to UK and have not been there since.

It is a relatively quieter city and the incidence of covid 19 in this part of the country is relatively low. It is only about two to three hours journey by car so we would avoid travelling by public transport.

To keep the risks down we chose to stay in a small countryside bed and breakfast which catered for only a few guests at a time.

I was excited and enthusiastic as we reached the city, kept on reminiscing to Bibha about my stay there.  In the city I went near the area where I had stayed. I did not recognise anything around St Mary’s Hospital where I worked all that time ago. It has changed so much. The hospital is now a community hospital instead of a busy district hospital of my memory’s past.  It is irrational but I felt let down. 

 To be honest I was there only for two and a half weeks and my whole attention was to overcome the anxiety of being in an alien place and at the same time trying to impress my colleagues with my work, and bed-manners  at the hospital. I don’t think I paid much attention to the surroundings and forty years have passed since. My memories were probably more a product of my brain’s imagination and editing over time as it always happens with long term memories.

When we went to the waterfront at the harbour it was the same story, everything was different. There were now many multi-storey buildings with gleaming glass fronts. It looked highly commercialised. One can not even enter the historic harbour area without buying a ticket let alone see the famous ships. I had bought the tickets online to avoid queuing. Strolling in the harbour we came to the most elegant ship there, HMS Victory made famous by its participation as the flag ship of Lord Nelson in the Battle of Trafalgar more than 200 years ago. My only sightseeing in Portsmouth in 1977 was a visit to HMS Victory!  I and Bibha went abode the ship. 

Once inside the ship I suddenly felt a strange sense of being there, seeing and touching various artefacts and hearing the description. I did not remember or recognise these things in the usual sense. I had only seen them for a few minutes 44 years ago! But I felt an odd familiarity, not nostalgic but a kind of Déjà vu-ish. In one of the lower decks, in spite of all the warning notices I hit my head on a beam on the low ceiling. I remembered that I did this in 1977 too!

Ship surgeon's table and tools

For next two days we visited many famous sites in the town and strolled on a few beaches, did a bit of shopping in the large new mall (Gunwharf Quays) and went up the 170m tall Spinnaker Tower for a spectacular view of the bay from 150 meters up.

We drove back home, luckily traffic was not bad. We both were tired but strangely felt happier and fresh. That’s what a holiday is for. Isn’t it?

Where else can one sit on a torpedo but at a naval base.

*Actually, it was my “attachment”. It was a mandatory paid assessment period where an overseas doctor was attached to a hospital unit for up to four weeks. Only on its successful completion one could get a training doctor job in the National Health Service.

 

View of the harbour from the top of Spinnaker Tower

MEMORY IS A WEIRD AND WONDERFUL THING!

"You are what you are only because you have the memories you have."

A few days ago I was walking along the banks of the river Wey which flows through the middle of our estate, enjoying the different shades of green leaves that have reappeared in Spring on the trees and shrubs growing on either side of the river. Suddenly a medium sized tree attracted my attention; it seemed very familiar and festive. I looked a bit closely, nothing exceptional. Bright green leaves, slightly darker stems, no flowers: pretty much like any other tree around it. I just continued my walk, stopping on the way to look at some wild flower or a bird.

That green plant kept on coming to fore in my mind like a catching tune.  It was not a strange or unique tree. It looked so common, still there must be something more to this tree than meets the eye to make me feel this way.

Next day I saw a similar tree just about hundred steps from my front door on the back of my neighbour’s house. I felt the same feeling of happiness and familiarity. I looked closely; it was the leaves that

attracted me most, a typical leaf, very symmetrical shape, one long spine in the middle with veins running at regular interval exactly parallel to each other. I took some photos on my mobile and brought some leaves home.

I put one leaf on the kitchen table and took a close-up photo of the leaf. Suddenly the penny dropped, a smile spread on my lips. Seeing the leaves in our kitchen suddenly triggered the association that was eluding me. 

 Of course this leaf has the exact pattern that my mother used to

put on the homemade cookies. When I was a child, every kitchen in our part of India had a wooden block with this pattern. It was used to decorate the sweet dough cookies before frying them in clarified butter (ghee). Colloquially these cookies were called Thekua or Khajur.

These cookies were made on most of the festive occasions and also whenever my mother was in a good mood and wanted to reward us. When I was in the medical college, I lived in a hostel. In holidays I went home. On my return she will pack a good number of these cookies for me to take back.

These leaves were associated with  all kinds of strong memories, olfactory, visual and auditory.It invoked a strong feeling of love, joy and festivity.

Memory is a weird and wonderful thing! You are what you are only because you have the memories you have.

EPISODIC MEMORY: AN EVOLUTIONARY MARVEL OR A DESIGN FAULT?

 Last week we went to a wedding reception. The parents of the bride are friends of ours. There was a pre-dinner short boat trip on the Thames. On the deck I saw a couple of other people who were mutual friends. We gravitated towards each other and ended up standing together on the deck.

I got busy talking to them but in the back of my mind something kept niggling. While getting on the boat I saw a familiar face but could not put a name or context to it. Who was that man? If I could remember where I met him before, I might be able to put a context and then maybe I could even recall his name. 

To say that you know a person you have to know the context  in addition to name and image.  When we meet a person and have interaction with, the brain acquires all these bits of information and automatically stores them. Unfortunately each bit is retained in a separate place, on top of that, as the time passes they are moved around perpetually depending on the priority our brain assigns them.

How does the brain prioritize, does not enter into our consciousness. Sometime very mundane and banal facts are kept in the fore of the mind and at other times even crucial or apoplectic events are forgotten.  Our brain does not share a lot of things with us! Is it an evolutionary asset or a design fault?    

Forgetting events and people associated with unpleasant or unimportant events certainly keeps us in positive frame of mind but forgetting important episodes puts us at a great disadvantage. The problem is that it is our brain that decides what is important, not our conscious mind. People who had been in rather close contact in past feel hurt when they find out that you cannot recall their names, faces or contexts. They impart blame as if you have “consciously” forgotten them.

Luckily, one of the friends who I was talking with said “have you met Rehman? He is here on the boat.” Suddenly the veil disappeared I remembered him. He worked with us in the same department and lived only a few blocks away. That was  20 yrs ago! All these bits of information were in my brain safely stored, just needed a trigger to bring them to my conscious mind. A few minutes later when he came near us, I met him with all the warmth that my memory has just delivered!

If you think memory is for keeping an accurate record of past, then it is flawed and defective. But as a tool for imagining future scenarios and thus preparing us to face the uncertainties of future better, it is a design marvel. This really is the purpose of memory. 

“Indeed, our ability to revisit the past may be only a design feature of our ability to conceive of the future” Suddendorf & Busby 2003

PROUSTIAN MEMORY: SMELL, MEMORY AND REALITY

Sun was shining; it was a completely blue sky. I sat in the garden with a book and a cup of coffee.  In the border near where I was sitting, there was a Marigold plant laden with flowers. The colours of the petals were a combination of dark red and bright yellow like flames of fire. Impulsively I plucked a couple of flowers and put it on the table. 

I opened my book and started reading. As soon as I opened the pages, a waft of familiar smell hit me. The smell was coming from my fingers, which I had used to pluck the marigold flowers. This familiar smell brought the memory of my high school days with such intensity that I felt physically transported in that big colourful marquee in the school field on a Saraswati Puja* day. I could see the statue of the goddess in bright yellow and red sari and the whole dais covered with marigold flowers. Most of the decoration was done a few days before but we arranged the flowers in the early hours of the morning so that they would look as fresh as possible. We also pinned a number of flowers to the fabric behind the statue in a gushing fountain design. I could see the face of my classmate who drew this design with a piece of wood charcoal.  I saw myself pricking my finger and reflexly sucking the tip. And there were my fingers, tinged green, yellow and red with intense smell of marigold just under my nose. This memory was like a hologram engulfing me, almost real.  

This kind of memory, where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings back a rush of memories, is called “Proustian Memory" named after Marcel Proust, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century.

I have smelled marigold before but I never felt like that. This time I think it was not just the smell but also many other sensory clues were similar. The day was sunny, temperature was not too cold, not too hot, very like late February or early March in India. I was sitting in a green grass lawn very similar though much smaller to the field in my high school. All these sensory inputs together probably reproduced exact environment, which I had once experienced, and the mind converted the memory into virtual reality.

Come to think of it, the reality we perceive is actually a creation of our mind.  The raw material with which mind creates reality is memories. I am now sitting in my study writing this blog. I am aware of the date and time and the fact that the bookcase is behind me and the telephone on my left side only because of my recent and not so recent memories. Though I am only seeing or touching a small fraction of my world, I am fully aware of it only due to this wonderful gift called memory. My present reality is based on my memories, not on what is actually there at exactly this moment. Another interesting topic for another blog.

*Saraswati Puja (also known as Basant Panchami) is a festival devoted to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music and art. The festival is celebrated with great enthusiasm in the schools & colleges of India.