MEMORY LOSS.

​There are large tracts of my life that are unaccountable to me. The missing chapters of my life cause me no great hardship, no emotional turmoil and they even go back as far as my childhood, the best years of your life or so it is claimed. But by and large it is as if my childhood never happened. Yes, I have hazy recollections of certain experiences but no recall of anything leading up to the event or any eventual outcome.
It is the same throughout adulthood, though these later memory-free years could be accounted for due to the number of times I fell from a horse or as in one incident I clearly recall, being kicked in the head by a mare who thought it a giant indignity to have her heels cleaned with a hoof-pick. I was unconscious for a few minutes, I am quite certain, though no one was aware of ‘my little sleep’ in the stable doorway.
Near the end of my ‘career’ with racehorses, a lovely old grey who I was feeding medicine to mixed up in a bran mash inadvertently – he would never have done it on purpose – done a proper job in knocking me out, resulting in an overnight hospital stay. The strange thing was, though I remember absolutely nothing from the moment I pulled the horse out of the field to feed him from a bucket, when I was found slumped over the gate, the grey and all his mates were contentedly grazing in the field with the gate shut tight. If I was not responsible for returning the grey to the field then some heartless bugger did it for me, leaving me to live or die in my own time.
In general, my memory is poor and I possess the ability to make my mind up to do something significant only to forget all about it literally seconds later. I can enter a shop knowing what I need to buy only for the purpose of my visit to go clean from my head only to return when I get home. It’s rather like when your computer freezes. Also, concentration is an issue to the point when it is easy to imagine mites have got into the circuitry of my brain and are slowly but surely short-circuiting my thoughts. On occasion it is as if the mites have taken control of my brain, if only as an experiment, as my thoughts and actions have been totally at odds with one another.
When I was a child I could reel off the past fifty Derby or Grand National winners, whereas now I can barely remember this year’s winner. The problem, if it is a problem and not a direct result of ageing, is that I can watch races on YouTube from the sixties, seventies, eighties and even more recently, without ever being sure of the winner. Topham Chase races I have a particular fondness for. And in the same piece of writing I can spell correctly and incorrectly the same word and I can think of just the right word to use only for it to float away not to return until hours later.
I admit to the diminishing of my mental abilities as in a previous piece of writing, ‘Frost’, I believe it was called as the thrust of the narrative was the remarkable Frost family, I unfairly suggested that Ami Rao’s book ‘Centaur’, written with and about the ex-jump jockey Declan Murphy, was perhaps slightly underwhelming and nowhere nearly as ‘beautifully written and genuinely revealing’ as Clare Balding promised it would be.
I particularly had a moan about the repetition after repetition of Declan reminding readers ‘how brilliant he was in the saddle’ and ‘how no one could tell him how to ride a race’. I had only read the first half a dozen chapters when I wrote ‘Frost’ and in my defence I did say that ‘something would perhaps come about to hit me in the face’ as explanation for what seemed to be indulgent arrogance.
Declan had four years of memory erased by either the fall that ended his career as a jockey or the surgeon’s scalpel that cut into his brain to save his life. When he eventually awoke from his coma in his head he was twelve-years-old and when he finally returned to the reality of his situation the four years previous to that fall at Haydock Park in 1994 were lost, never to be recovered. The best years of his life were only reality to him in photographs, print and film. And the attributes he seemingly paid himself in the book were description of him by other people. I think he had to repeat them to believe them.
Usually with biography or memoir the emphasis for the writer is to persuade the reader to like or feel sympathy for the man or woman who is the subject of the book. The reason, I believe, I struggled throughout the book to ‘like’ Declan Murphy – sympathy was a given from the first word of the first chapter – was because ‘Centaur’ is not a memoir about one man but about a man who the present Declan Murphy does not truly know and who is not a whole personality anyway but fragments of a man, some from his life as Declan Murphy the jump jockey and some from the man the fall forced him to become.
‘Centaur’ is the perfect book for a racing man or woman to give as a present to a book-loving non-racing man or woman as the racing plays second fiddle in an orchestra of insight into the sport, brain injury and how to, and perhaps how not to, recover from such trauma.