Another Memory Picture

I was standing at the sink this morning doing the washing up and wondering why the small birds seemed to have given up their near-constant competition for the feeders when I had a sudden, very vivid vision of....

....a view not unlike this one except in colour. I have no idea why these memory pictures, as I call them, explode on me, or what triggers them - I had no particular reason to be thinking of our three years at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia all those fifty or more years ago. It's as if my brain suddenly generates a random number and then sends some electrical pulses off to collect whatever memory is in that box, and then slams it in to my consciousness.

The picture is always still, in colour, very sudden, very real, followed by a slow fading. I don't mind them, which is just as well as they are becoming more frequent, though they leave me feeling a little upset because what lingers is a wish that I could wind the clock back to those days and because - and this is another feature - they are almost always of a place where I was very happy.

Occasionally the picture is a reaction to something I'm looking at, a bird or a shell on a beach, a skyscape, a flower, and the memory is usually of something similar but better, like a much bigger or more exotic bird.

Maybe the memory pictures happen because my mind isn't as busy as it used to be and, therefore, has more scope for doing what it wants: and cheering me with recollections of past happiness can't do any harm except.... I so wish I could live those experiences all over again.