Remember.

Some twenty years ago, I tried to persuade Jnr to study memory techniques; of course, back then in the eyes of an early teenager, I was stupid and didn’t know anything. I do remember being a little annoyed that the school weren’t interested in anything as modern and radical as techniques used by the Romans. When I was at school, (honestly, I can remember things that happened back then) I was in trouble for not being able to remember the year that Columbus sailed for the Americas by using the rhyme something like, “In nineteen hundred and forty-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Me pointing out that the only way to remember the rhyme was to first learn when he committed the deed did not help matters.


Now that Jnr is working on his second degree, he is beginning to realise the value of good memory skills and his spending all his spare time studying them and wishing that he had done so twenty years ago.
 
This book is a study of the method of walking through a house, it uses three worked examples the first of which is the list of the English monarchs. The walk starts off with you being woken up by the discordant jangling of the alarm clock, (it is important to visualise the discordant noise). The clock is a novelty in the shape of a Mercedes, (cue the first king was a Mercian) and the time is 7:57, the year he came to the throne. And there is the king emptying a bucket of evil smelling (imaging the awful stench) and slimy offal over you (can you just feel it slithering over your naked skin). Yes, let me introduce you to King Offa, the first of the kings of England, a Mercian, who came to the throne in 757AD. Now, can you smell the sizzling bacon, sausage and egg cooking? You go out onto the landing and there is a king busy over a camp fire, on the carpet that is now badly burnt and giving off an acrid smell, and he wants you to eat his great all-fried breakfast: so this is Alfred the Great and he’s good at burning things. You then go into the bathroom where you meet the next four kings . . . .
 
O.k. so I’ve only glimpsed at the first page of the book and that was a week ago – but it seems to work. Jnr has managed to memorise the periodic table, as yet he’s a bit slow at thinking up the preposterous story with its connections – but he’s a stubborn bugger, I wonder who he inherited that from.
 

Thanks are due to Ingeborg for this week’s mono Monday challenge, the theme is “Memorable” and, as usual, I’m late posting.