À la recherche du temps perdu

[dellzeqq]

No, not messages- Planning Reports!

oh, they read every word - we've got quite the most tooled up objectors you can imagine. One is a maths professor who will doubtless want the algorithm for the RTL calcs. What hasn't occurred to them is that our clients can make application after application after application for eight years and blight their £2.5M houses in the process. The longer they object, the more they suffer.

Sorry - to get back to the OP. I'm not sure that we're looking for some kind of mnemonic mechanism - rather the recognition of significance and the construction of an understanding (in Proust's case an understanding founded in loss) of what our progress through life means, and how we construct the narration of our lives.

I've had to come to terms with a loss of memory. It's a sadness that I can't remember (for example) where we went for our holiday last year, or what we did last Christmas. I have to latch on to isolated images. I've looked for memories in the present - essentially by repeating things, and creating significance that is immediate. Friendship is the key. I don't remember what I've said to people a month previously, or even the day before, but I know I'm fond of them, and I know that I can re-construct an understanding of our friendship. That's a wonderful thing - bashing away at the present to bring the past to life.

 

[srw]

Clients who can afford to hire you for eight years of planning applications? Not working for the supermarkets these days, are you dell?

 

[dellzeqq]

Clients who can afford to hire you for eight years of planning applications? Not working for the supermarkets these days, are you dell?

well, mostly I refuse to bill them, which is fantastically amusing. It's like saying 'you get twenty rides for two quid'. My latest trick is to get them to hire somebody else. I'm going to play the completely unreasonable, unrelenting oppressor of the upper middle classes and he's going to be the cavalry of reasonableness. The fact that his proposal will add a million to the value of the land is pure coincidence. Hopefully I can then stop work (other than doing the construction management) and find myself a proper job. Lollipop Man would be good.

 

[theclaud]

Friendship is the key. I don't remember what I've said to people a month previously, or even the day before, but I know I'm fond of them, and I know that I can re-construct an understanding of our friendship.

I'd just like to help you reconstruct the fact that I definitely don't owe you a tenner.

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

As someone who gave up reading Proust half way through Jeune Filles en Fleurs when I realised I'd attempted a particularly epic sentence, epic even by Proust's exacting standards, four times before abandoning the book in the toilet, where it remains to this day, 5 years later, I think the nearest I can come to a ''madeleine moment'' is in the recollection of young women. Oh, and nostalgia for less tortuous sentences.... But young women mostly.

 

[TheDoctor]

Barbara Good or Servalan?

I am sure Freud or any other psychoanalyst would have a field day with that one!

It's a good job that psychoanalysis is utter bollox from start to finish. Or (to be a little more polite about it) it is, shall we say, incompatible with serious and reputable scientific methodology.

Anyway (and getting back on-topic, if only for a moment) I can personally vouch that Arch does indeed have culture.
I've seen her fridge...
*ducks*

 

[Hover Fly]

There's a book by Proust in our library. It's got a brown cover.

 

[rikki]

getting back on-topic

??
What the hell is this thread about anyway?

 

[Cheddar George]

??
What the hell is this thread about anyway?

Small seemingly insignificant things that evoke a powerful memory, if you haven't read Proust get "Ratatouille" on DVD instead.

 

[Maz]

In a similar way, the themes of Kojak, Starsky and Hutch or Cagney and Lacey bring strongly to mind the taste of a crisp sandwich, which was often a Saturday night supper treat. Usually while Mum cut Dad's hair with a sort of razor comb, him sitting on a chair on a plastic sheet. I can hear that comb going through hair now...

This is scarily accurate from my childhood (right down to the razor comb - weird looking thing). Are you my sister?

I still eat crisp sandwiches now (preference for salt n vinegar flavour). ......

 

[Arch]

This is scarily accurate from my childhood (right down to the razor comb - weird looking thing). Are you my sister?

I still eat crisp sandwiches now (preference for salt n vinegar flavour). ......

I don't think so. I don't recall having a brother...

Salt and vinegar in a crisp sandwich! Sacrilege! Plain only for me.

Incidentally, I learned at an early age that a crisp sandwich must be consumed fresh. I asked for one in my packed lunch for school and found that by lunchtime the moisture from the marg had soaked into the crisps, turning them into deeply disappointing thin disks of tasteless potato. I remember the moment of discovery, for some reason it was in the TV room at school, where we were trotted along to watch Watch, and similar. And the boys always played at shooting out the disappearing dots on the countdown clock. And Colin Wilson fainted once, to the horror of the teacher - Mrs Wilson, his Mum.

The only programme from which I recall any detail was a sciencey one, that featured footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse.

 

[mangaman]

Proving to Dellzeqq that we denizens of Tea? are not entirely without culture, I'm giving this thread a fancy title, referring to the theme of involuntary memory.

I just posted in the Dallas thread about how the theme music makes me think of childhood bedtime, and how I would often sit very still and quiet in the hope of being forgotten rather than sent to bed. In a similar way, the themes of Kojak, Starsky and Hutch or Cagney and Lacey bring strongly to mind the taste of a crisp sandwich, which was often a Saturday night supper treat. Usually while Mum cut Dad's hair with a sort of razor comb, him sitting on a chair on a plastic sheet. I can hear that comb going through hair now.

Carrot tops take me back to the garden of our family flat, and the landlady's rabbit which we looked after sometimes. And hence, huge blue hydrangea bushes.

What are your Madeleine moments?

I love the mental picture of the Arch home, with Mr Arch on a plastic seat while Mrs Arch cuts his hair with some sort of razor comb. Meanwhile the young Arch eats a crisp sandwich as quietly as possible in order to watch Cagney and Lacey.

Great stuff.

Similar for me (without the haircutting or crisps). Trying to somehow "blend in" with my older brother so my parents wouldn't notice I was still up for Match of the Day

 

[Arch]

I love the mental picture of the Arch home, with Mr Arch on a plastic seat while Mrs Arch cuts his hair with some sort of razor comb. Meanwhile the young Arch eats a crisp sandwich as quietly as possible in order to watch Cagney and Lacey.

Great stuff.

Similar for me (without the haircutting or crisps). Trying to somehow "blend in" with my older brother so my parents wouldn't notice I was still up for Match of the Day

For the sake of detail, the chair was wooden, on a plastic sheet on the floor. The plastic sheet was in fact a plastic table cloth from when my sister and I were little, and featured various printed boards for games like snakes and ladders and ludo. I think it also had bits you could colour in with felt tip, and then wipe clean.

It's funny now, to think how much effort we put into staying up a few more minutes. Now, I can go to bed when I choose, and most nights I'm happy to go. Some days, I'm ready to sleep about 9pm!

 

[dellzeqq]

one would be surprised, should one wander through the 2200 pages of 'Remembrance...........' how little time Proust (or, rather, the narrator) has for food. Of course the real Proust was a man of energetic tastes. Paying a milkboy to masturbate in front of him, or having two starved rats set upon each other and finding in their shrieks a delight so profound that he ejaculated within a minute. The point is....the book is fiction. It's about a man who is in love with one woman, then another, and then another, (I'm leaving Grandma out of this). It's an endless source of joking references, and that's a good thing (my fave is in Transporter, and I dare to suggest it's more complex than one might think) but..........it's not a memoir. So, when Proust writes about these little cakes he's making it up

Sorry.............as you were.

 

[ayceejay]

Speaking of memory: an old guy visits the doctor for his annual check up.
"You've got cancer and Alzheimer's" the doctor said.
The old man went pale "Alzheimer's you say, thank god I don't have cancer."