As I read books to the toddler, memories are flooding back

I know we have to forget stuff. Biologically speaking, we need to put some experiences away.

For example, if you’re to have any inclination to have another child, you need to forget a lot of the gorier details about how you spent the first year of the previous child’s life.

Yes, we know there were sleepless nights, slightly smelly shoulders, poo up the back (of the baby but possibly you if you had them in a sling and hadn’t secured everything properly).

But we don’t necessarily remember all the details. They blend into one another in a sort of hybrid mix of bodily fluids.

I just wish that when I forgot things, I would forget them properly.

As in deleted from the main drive, and the backup, and the bit the police can get at even if you think you’ve deleted it.

As in forget I ever remembered them. Because what happens in some cases is that I can remember shadows of something, a tantalising glimpse, a feeling, a smell, a sound.

And I proceed to drive myself nuts trying to remember the rest of it.

For example, there is a song in my head which I heard in 1994 when it was on a CD loaned to my brother by a friend of his.

I say “a song” but it is not a song now. It is a tuneless chewed-up snippet that might not even be right.

It goes “[dubby-dum dum doo-dum, dubby dum] something something feelings so good, in my heart”.

Except it probably doesn’t go like that at all. Even the guy who loaned the CD is baffled.

Sometimes when I try to recall it, I conflate it with a Lilt ad. Not the “Toatally trapical ta-aste’ Lilt ad. But another one.

A brief campaign that had a … AH SHITE I CAN’T REMEMBER THAT EITHER.

I wish I could forget it completely, but I never will.

I will go to my grave not knowing what that song was because I can’t reproduce enough of it to search, either via humans or via Google.

Google just laughs at me and gives me information on dum-dum bullets and heart attack diagnosis.

In recent times, these almost unsearchable snippets are coming from a new source. Children’s books.

As I read books to the toddler, memories are flooding back.

The Proustian trigger for them is the size and shape of the children’s books, and the state of them.

Especially the library ones. The battered state of them. Is there anything lovelier than a child’s battered book?

Pages with Sellotape across them where someone else’s baby tore into it with glee at the touch and feel, buttery finger marks, a purple marker streeled across a painstaking illustration.

Some memories are reasonably fully-formed. The mobile library at Dripsey Cross every second Thursday.

The absolute EFFING MAGIC of getting into a vehicle that had shelves in it. Shelves! A seat at the back! CAN YOU EVEN? as the young people say now.

Depending on how the library parked, it was sometimes on a slight slope so it had the feeling of the lair of a rather benign Adam-West-Batman villain.

These memories can be satisfyingly packaged up and communicated. They are comforting. It’s the other ones that are infuriating.

The look or the smell of a page sparks something and I remember a book but not the title, or the author, or all the plot, just a vague notion that it might have been about a warlock who ends up accidentally babysitting a child with the runs.

That’s it. Nothing else.

Or the book about panther-like cats that spoke and lived on a frozen planet, or was it a desert one?

I should just let these snippets go. And I had for a long time.

But since the Internet and archiving of Everything That Ever Existed, it becomes harder to accept that it is possible that some stuff is just gone.

So just on the off-chance, you don’t happen to know a song that goes Dubby-dum-dum do dumm dubby-dum, do you?