A special place is like any other place, almost exactly but not quite like a place that really exists.
In fact, a special place is just a place we attach an idealised memory to.
That is the problem with memory, our special places are different to how we remember them. Even your own home is different from how you would describe it to another person. I forget things about places. I forget important things about unimportant places and I forget unimportant things about important places. I have forgotten places altogether, until I see them again. Then I wonder if the place has changed or if I have mis-remembered how it was. Sometimes places are so different to what I remember that I don’t think I have been there before, then I recognise a feature and remember I have. I am beginning to think there are no special places, just loosely recollected montages of events we choose to remember happening and attach them around a bit of geography we choose to reconstruct.
I do, like you do, have places I remember. Although if I went back to the place I remember I could find it is in another country. Like the mountain walk I did in Malaysia that actually happened in Indonesia, or the perfect waves I caught off Bombo that I actually rode at Gerroa.
I also don’t remember the places people live in. Well, I do remember the people and the places, but not always the right people in the right places. This means I often think a person has a hobby or a preference that stems from a misplaced memory of a visit to their house or a meal I shared with them once.
None of this is anything more than occasionally slightly awkward and most times conversations or circumstances correct my error before I embarrass myself. But it does mean I no longer speak certainly about places I have been nor do I make recommendations of places to go. I have given up introducing friends to people I know who I think live in places they are going to. No good will come from that. I am sure they would enjoy each other's company but only if the people are in fact living where I think they are.
I put it all down to smart phones, earth maps, on-line diaries, social networking and linked address books. Technologies that obviate our need for long term, detail or spatial memory. Information is at a finger touch, names, addresses, birthday reminders for people you would never usually talk to.
Or the memory dysfunction could be from the drugs and alcohol.
Last month I got a message from an old friend I worked with in Tokyo, an ex-pat Canadian I first met while working in Australia back in the '80’s. As a motivational speaker she now travels the world doing things and tells me, as a side issue, she is planning to get to a total of one hundred and one countries she will have visited. I find that rather daunting, despite the fact it has taken her many years and mostly at the behest of clients. She did send me the message during a rather less than enthralling visit to Romania. I mean, I can’t even recall all the towns and pubs I have seen in Yorkshire, granted they do have slightly samey grace to them, but recalling 101 countries? Why? And how the hell do you differentiate the memories? I got places in Malaysia and Indonesia confused…. How does one differentiate the Slavic and Ik-stan countries in a memory-bank of foods, paths, villages, cities and peoples? Having said that, I do recall clearly the coffee we shared together in Manly, the sake she bought me in Ukai Toriyama, and the ales I repaid her with in Skipton so perhaps her brain has similar links, triggers or other aide-de-memoir for her other 98 countries.
I hear that travel broadens the mind but I do wonder just how broad a mind needs to be. I of course can’t remember how many countries, meals and people I have seen, eaten and met but I guess every place, meal and person has probably left a trace memory. Some strong, some fogged, some pleasant some painful, some clear memories but all grow vaguer over time unless regularly recollected.
Recollection, when prompted, is an amazing thing. One night, must be over ten years ago, during a swank meal somewhere I can’t recall, my then boss made a passing comment about a posh restaurant in Mildura, because he knew I travelled down that way. Yesterday my friend Jon who I met in the UK a couple of years ago and now lives in Adelaide messaged saying he was travelling through Mildura. How I remembered the name of the restaurant to recommend to him I will never know. Go figure that for a place memory. It was Steffano’s if you are interested, and I now know from Jon that Steffano has started a new kitchen in a Mildura Brewery, set up in the old cinema. Now, its stuff like that I can guarantee you, if I am ever again travelling in New South Wales, on that road from Canberra, wanting a good meal, I will not recall one bit of this and I will stop and buy a burger at the shop next to the petrol station like I have every other time.
It is this about special places I most abhor. Not only are they just like any other place that may or may not exist but the special-ness is related to a memory not to the reality.
Seffano’s restaurant from ten years ago may or may not still exist, Jon didn’t say, I am to this day unsure if the wave I caught was off which headland on the south coast of New South Wales or if I ever was with my Canadian friend drinking sake on a Japanese Mountain. I do know I have caught many waves, been to the mountain many times, I have drunk many things, I have enjoyed the company of many friends in many of their special places and I intend to continue to do so.
Just don’t ask me to recommend special places, as while I have many special memories I would not want to mislead you to a place or a person that does not exist..
