What was I saying again?

I’m sitting at Gloria Jeans in Melbourne Central. My coffee is hot and strong. Perched on my bar stool, opposite the shot tower just along from the giant clock, it’s a perfect vantage point for people watching. They spill from the top of the elevator like robots off a production line.

Since gaining a position as an editing intern at the Victorian Writers Centre, located at the SLV in the new Wheeler Centre, it’s my new Monday morning routine; I dash over to the park with the dog, walk to the station, catch the train, get absorbed in a book, alight and merge into the people river, flow with the current, materialise from the other end of the escalator, order coffee, and settle down to watch. I love it. The extra effort of getting up and leaving early is worth it.

There is something alluring about having a leisurely coffee, on your own, and looking at life happen around you. Taking it all in. Filing it away in your writer brain. Observing the small details – the clothes, shoes, the gait, the hair styles, the expressions on faces. Watching small interactions, body language, listening in to titbits of conversation. Wondering where each person has come from, where they are going, what their day will hold: students toting laptops; executives with their fingers down their Monday morning collars; mothers with girlfriends ready to rip into kid-free retail; retired couples with no deadlines; ambling teenagers holding hands; tourists with maps and back packs and free time. Multicultural Melbourne moving into the day.

Sometimes I struggle to find the balance between living in the moment – to experience the moment for all it is worth – and trying to capture the moment on the camera of my memory, trying to think of words I would use to describe the moment in print, before it has passed into the inaccessible abyss of the past.

Sometimes I miss the moment because the words won’t come quickly enough. Or won’t come at all.

Or they come too late, when my addled brain becomes stuck in a futile loop. As it seems to all too often these days. Is it because I don’t get enough sleep – don’t give my poor brain the time it needs to empty itself of the dross of the day and to dream? Because the daily list of things that must be done increasingly becomes a Norman Lindsay Magic Pudding list, infuriatingly self propagating?

Or are my shrinking vocabulary and lengthening word-recall times symptoms of something more sinister?

I recently re-visited the movie Iris, the true story of the brilliant author and philosopher Iris Murdoch, played magnificently by Judi Dench. It is a powerful and heart-rending story of the love between Iris and her husband and soulmate, John Bayley, his devotion to her, and Murdoch’s gradual demise as she succumbs to dementia. When I first saw Iris, at the movies several years ago, as I came out of the cinema its effect was so overwhelming I wished I could go off by myself and curl up in a corner and weep.

An increasingly unreliable memory can make you feel humiliated and silly. It can slow down your writing when you know the word you want to use in a certain context, but it refuses to surface. It can be a downright nuisance. And it can be debilitating, undermining your self confidence. Take for example, when you’re talking with a group of articulate and intelligent writer friends, and you’re dying to tell them about the book you’re currently reading, but you can recall neither the title nor the author. Then you’re ready to launch into an account of an experience you had recently, to do with the topic of conversation. But you stop yourself, just in time, because you ‘re about to say you had your ears peeled and you suddenly remember it’s your eyes that are peeled and it’s your ear to the ground. And anyway, by the time you’ve sorted it out, they’ve moved on to another topic.

I once heard Helen Garner say she knows her memory is not what it was. She compensates by keeping a list of interesting words she comes across in the course of her day-to-day life, next to her computer. And like me, she struggles to recall the actual events, names of characters and even why she enjoyed the last book she read.

I know I’m in good company. But all the same it’s frustrating and just a bit scary. So I’ll try to get more sleep, keep up the crosswords and up the Ginkgo Biloba. And try not to worry too much if I mix up a few metaphors.

And be thankful that so far, the Monday morning coffee seems to be helping my brain to function when I’m over the road at the VWC, frantically willing the words to jump off the tip of my tongue and onto the page.