“The dinosaurs were migrating from card to card,” I say. Testing my memory against my children’s was always humiliating, but now I find it actually hurts a little. The other is next to a tree, facing right. One stegosaurus is by a swamp, facing left. “Yeah, but they’re different,” says the middle one. On my go I turn over two cards and, striking lucky, attempt to retrieve them. My wife flips over a card: two apatosauruses walking side by side. The next card features a stockier, plated species. “Ah, the long boy,” says the oldest, turning over some kind of sauropod. I sit out the first round, refilling my glass and watching in mounting horror: the instant a card is turned back over, I forget which dinosaur is on the other side.īy the second round, my sons have remembered their old nicknames for specific pictures – a key aid, since the cards contain no other information. In his mid-20s the middle one may no longer possess a toddler’s astounding recall, but he still has the knack – pair after pair fall into his clutches.
The table is cleared, and the cards laid out in a messy grid. “Are they all in there?” says the middle one. “I found it while I was looking for something else,” my wife says. The car doesn’t make any strange noises while I complete a single circuit of the neighbourhood, braking sharply and repeatedly.Īfter lunch my wife produces a box I have not seen for 20-odd years. “You could drive it around the block now and see for yourself,” she says. “It makes a terrible noise whenever you brake,” she says. “I couldn’t get to the supermarket because of the car.”
“We’re just having salad and cheese for lunch,” she says. My wife walks into the kitchen with some shopping. “Should I keep looking, or just make another one?” I say. ‘To be fair, I had some white as well,’ I say I’m sure that bottle of red wine you drank didn’t help,’ my wife says. It is Sunday and I am just back from a three-date stint with the band I’m in, exhausted and weighing up three equally likely possibilities: that I have made myself a coffee and drunk it that I have made myself a coffee and left it somewhere weird that I have not yet made myself a coffee. But if I could go back and speak to that thirtysomething father now, I would simply say: you have no idea. He just shrugs, because he’s winning.Īt the time I feared my brain was dying. When the afternoon is over we will have played 17 times, and my performance will not have improved. When the game is over I have six cards in my pile he has 30.
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