England, England [antikvár]

ct a That's your first memory?' someone would ask. V V And she would reply, 'I don't remember.' Most people assumed it was a joke, though a few suspected her of being clever. But it was what she believed. 'I know just what you mean,' sympathisers would say, preparing to explain and simplify. 'There's always a memory just behind your first memory, and you can't quite get at it.' But no: she didn't mean that either. Your first memory wasn't something like your first bra, or your first friend, or your first kiss, or your first fuck, or your first marriage, or your first child, or the death of your first parent, or your first sudden sense of the lancing hopelessness of the human condition - it wasn't like any of that. It wasn't a solid, seizable thing, which time, in its plodding, humorous way might decorate down the years with fanciful detail - a gauzy swirl of mist, a thundercloud, a coronet - but could never expunge. A memory was by definition not a thing, it was a memory. A memory now of a memory a bit earlier of a memory before that of a memory way back when. So people assertively remembered a face, a knee that bounced them, a springtime meadow; a dog, a granny, a woollen animal whose ear disintegrated after wet chewing; they remembered a pram, the view from a pram, falling out of a pram and striking their head on an upturned flower-pot which their brother had placed to climb up on and view the new arrival (though many years later they would begin to wonder if that brother had not wrenched them out of sleep and dashed their head against the flower-pot in a primal moment of sibling rage .). They