Summer sun, something’s begun..

To anyone my age that phrase may bring a vision of Olivia Newton John in Grease the original movie. One little phrase and I am right back to where I saw that film; a hot and stuffy cinema in Stamford Hill, with work colleagues just after the film was released. By thinking of that occasion, I remember people and things I haven’t thought of for years

Memory can be like that. We can encode memories then store them away, sometimes for tens of years. Then something happens that allows us to retrieve them, things we thought long forgotten. Sometimes good, like my works cinema trip. Sometimes bad, like when we thought we’d “got over” something and it turns out it was just buried and waiting for the right moment to pop out and be dealt with

And when it’s come up into the light and we’ve been able to put it into the past tense, it can feel such a relief. It may take a few “visits” to the memory to get there, but when it’s done, then the good stuff the memory was hiding is sometimes released too.