How does it feel to lose your mind?

My memory has never been particularly good. I am reasonably good at retaining things that are interesting to me, but the everyday stuff doesn’t usually stick. Thanks to a wife who is much better at it than me and the occasional making of lists, I manage to get by. Recently however, there was an incident that made me feel uneasy, and wonder if I might be slowly losing my grip on things.

A little ways back we had a spot of sunny weather (hard to believe in our current state of grey skies and rain), during which I dusted off my sunglasses. One day I had taken them to work, and resolved to get a few minor jobs done over my lunch hour. My glasses were on the corner of my desk. At lunchtime I left work and headed to one of our local retail parks. As I arrived at the first shop I wandered inside, picked up a few things, browsed for a moment and went to pay. On the way out I went to put my sunglasses back on, only to realise I didn’t have them.

I checked back at the till, where the shop-worker had no interest in helping me at all. I retraced my way through the shop, checking all the places I had gone. I had a clear memory of wearing my glasses on the walk over, of taking them off as I walked in the shop and of holding them as I walked around. I could only assume that someone had picked them up and walked off with them. Red mist began to descend. While I calmly walked out of the shop and back to work, I was burning internally with a completely over the top fury. The shop, the person who must have taken them, anyone else I found to be slightly irritating; all were wished an untimely and violent death. (As a side note, I don’t genuinely wish for anyone’s death (apart from maybe Robbie Williams’) and wouldn’t attempt to engineer someone’s. I can wish an untimely death on a person internally when I’m annoyed because there’s no such thing as magic, and it wouldn’t actually have any effect. Anyway, due to the aforementioned red mist, this one would like to enter a plea of temporary insanity, guv’nor.)

Upon arriving back at work, it was quite distressing to note that my sunglasses were there on the corner of my desk where I had left them. I had never taken them with me. Those memories of removing them as I entered the shop and such were a garbled pile of steaming crap dreamt up by my failing brain as I struggled to recall the last thing I did with my glasses. So, I had got ridiculously angry over something that I was completely wrong about. Sometimes I can’t help feeling like I’m on the top of a long, gently-sloping decline into obliviousness and dementia. It is a cause for concern.