There is a particular term, Valerie, which strikes terror in the heart of small Penelope:

early-onset Alzheimer’s. Does that not send chills of the highest order down your spine? Now as you surely know dear, I have always been one of the more scattered of brained beings, but not so long ago I was beginning to have serious doubts about whether, in fact, this affliction were less incidental than pathological. Take, for instance, the time I accidentally booked a flight to Bangkok instead of Brisbane. Or the way I consistently confuse tomatoes with potatoes, cherries with grapes, washing with shopping. Or any one of the several times last year that I accidentally made saucy little hatinators for staid old biddies, and giant feathered monstrosities for the high-at-heel and young-at-heart. Or the way I can never seem to remember what I did yesterday. Or what the book I just finished reading was about. And then there was the mortifying confusion of Susans Sarandon and Sontag at a dinner party once.

I was spiralling into a full-scale panic about my mental faculties until I read an editorial by a lady who is prone to leaving books in the vegetable crisper. She could trace her absent-mindedness right back to her grandmother, who one day was chopping soap for the copper and vegetables for the soup at more or less the same time. Needless to say, the soap ended up in the soup, and the laundry turned into minestrone.

Until such an occasion eventuates, darling, I think I can relax a little.

A learned woman I met once had been reading a book about the human brain. She told me that the brain is plastic: in other words, mutable. When parts of the brain sit disused, they are trimmed away to allow development in other areas. What worried her was the state of education in relation to our cranial development. When she was at school, she said, students were forced to memorise large chunks of poetry, Shakespeare, the Bible. Most of it was irrelevant, of course. Whoever quotes tracts of Hamlet in everyday speech? What counted was the process. The act of recall. How are younger generations supposed to gain the capacity for sustained, concentrated thought, she asked, when memorisation is reduced to an English oral with palmcards, television is presented in bite-sized chunks of entertainment and advertising, and the internet is a tangle of hyperlinked info-bytes?

I have heard a similar argument put forward in relation to literacy in ancient societies. Someone once told me that some civilisations preferred to maintain illiteracy amongst the general populace so that their memories would remain supple (amongst other, less noble reasons, I’m sure). Now, I haven’t been able to verify this yet, darling, but it is a fair point: writing something down immediately gives us license to forget it. Why bother remembering when your Blackberry can remember for you?

Really, Valerie, I ask you: is it any wonder our memories are getting worse by the day, when our brains are trained to receive and dispose of morsels of information within the same heartbeat?? Like the time I walked through customs on my arrival from an overseas trip, chatting merrily on the phone to one of my dearest friends. An official kindly informed me that I could earn a $250 fine for having my mobile on. Hadn’t I seen the sign? Of course not, or if I had I'd forgotten: I was jet-lagged, and blinded by the posters promising duty-free delights around the corner. Another time a railway official roundly abused me for taking my suitcase up the escalator. I was meant to use the lift; hadn’t I seen the sign? Of course not, or if I had I'd forgotten: it was obliterated by ads for Frangelico and a forest of whipper-snappers waving copies of MX in my face. Valerie, we are simply glutted on a neverending smorgasbord of textual fragments which are so small that we cannot help but read them. Most of them, of course, are useless, so what happens? We become trained forgetters!

I went to Taiwan not so long ago. I don’t know a word of Mandarin, and I can’t begin to tell you the relief of not being able to understand a single sign in the city. It had its navigational disadvantages, of course, but oh! The serenity! The sense of calm that comes from not having words flashing into your head wherever you look! The luxury of following a train of thought from A to Z without the distractions of inane, unrelated text (shop names, ads, slogans, news headlines, latest offers, menus in the window, today onlys, bargain buy now cheap cheap cheap)! I came home and almost began to wish I were illiterate, just to enjoy the freedom of a single uninterrupted thought.

Darling, I think I will pretend to be blind. I’ll walk around with my eyes shut wearing dark glasses and swishing a cane at people’s ankles. I will starve myself of all written materials save those that I expressly choose to partake of. I will take control of my cerebral diet once and for all! And just think what will happen to my intellect!

Yours in imminent genius,

Penelope.