Who stole my marbles?

Since I hit the age of 49 in April, I can apparently look forward to hitting menopause in the next six years. I already exhibit three of the noted symptoms: memory loss, lack of energy, aches and pains.
Certainly I’ve noticed the increasing number of complete pains who inhabit the world, but perhaps that’s not what was meant.
Happily the hot flushes are still in the future. I am stocking up on phytoestrogens and recipes for ladybread so I’m ready to fight back when the Doom approaches.
The prime aggravation, however, is the diminishing ability to get hold of information from my own brain: age-associated memory impairment, or, in a word, amnesia.
Lovely Greek word, Amnesia. Nice girl’s name. If I ever get another cat, that’s what I’ll call it. If I remember.
I can recall first names, but not surnames. Couldn’t yesterday (and still can’t) remember the name of the serial killer doctor in Hyde. Can see his face, but his name remains in the storeroom of my brain, safely filed away. Can give you an asssortment of other serial killers, from Manson to the Wests, but the good doctor? No.
A little while ago I forget the word moussaka. I was telling someone the recipe, and came to a dead stop when the word I wanted just wasn’t there.
It’s not just words and faces. Have forgotten several parties, lunches and meetings in the last couple of years, to my great embarrassment. I double-booked myself last week with two speaking engagements on the same day, 250 miles apart. Oops.
Some smart alec in India who can remember ludicrously long strings of numbers declared this month that mobile phones are responsible for memory loss. Hurray, I thought, a great excuse: all that electromagnetic radiation scrambling my grey matter like hotel breakfast eggs. I can get all upset again about electronic gizmos dealing death on the invisible spectrum to us innocent consumers of technology.
But no. The memory man just meant that because we can tap buttons to find phone numbers we no longer exercise our memories and turn into mental slobs. OK, clever dick, so some of us have more to remember than a string of digits. That’s my favourite excuse, actually – that I have so much information stuffed in my head that there’s just no room for any more. So how come I can’t choose what I retain? Why do I have to remember the Russian word for cranberry, or that the dishevelled cop in Hill Street Blues who snarled like a Dobermann at people was called Belker, facts which are of no use for anything except pub quizzes?
Biologists doing research for drug companies are using pond snails to find a cure for memory loss. They wave pear drops under the snail’s nose before giving it a sugary treat, while another snail gets tickled before its supper. (Snails don’t like being tickled, but they do like the smell of pear drops.) Since humans haven’t evolved as far from pond life as we like to think, we still share the molecular mechanism that controls memory and learning.
But as drug research moves forward slower than the average snail, I shall have to find another strategy. My favoured route is to release the grumpy old bag who lurks beneath my upbeat and youthful mien. A local goddess for the middle aged woman is dear old Nellie Boswell, Carla Lane’s Liverpudlian matriarch, snapping the heads off any unfortunate to come within biting distance of her doorstep in the Dingle. Personified by Jean Boht in the TV series Bread, Nellie is not so much a desperate housewife as a one-woman Panzer division.
But still, Nellie’s rage comes from thwarted passion and optimism, which is not grumpy-old-bag enough. Anyone who has seen the Hallmark cartoon character Maxine will have a good idea of my role model. Cynical, louche and very funny, Maxine would have pleased Dylan Thomas no end: going gentle anywhere, let alone into that good night, is not a concept that Maxine would recognise. Everything annoys her; she minces up sacred cows for beefburgers. She is unafraid and unapologetic; political correctness is the bullseye of her darts board.
My heroine. As yet, despite my ambition to be a Scouse Maxine, I am still too eager to be thoughtful, fair, courteous, reasonable: I still want to be liked, even by waiters in hotels in Warsaw (but that’s another story). I reckon, though, that a few months of hot flushes and other charming menopusal symptoms will take care of all that. It may not be for another six years, but on the other hand…

SHIPMAN! Dr Shipman..... thank you brain.