Quiz time

JON: Marie and I have had a bit of a row this week. It’s a pretty childish on both our parts but still miserable while it goes on.

The problem has two parts. The first part is that “we have a plan” for the processes and work involved in our up-coming house move. We have apparently discussed this at great length and depth. The second part is that I keep asking for details of the plan. Marie finds this very annoying as I keep asking about things that she claims we have already discussed to bits, and I can’t say I blame her.

However, rather than telling me that we have had the same conversation five times already and please (for god’s sake) will I pay attention this time – which would seem to me a reasonable strategy – what happens instead is that she starts to quiz me: “We’ve agreed this already, you know perfectly well what was decided, so you tell me the answer to your question”. Put under stress like this, my mind goes blank, my mouth dries up entirely and I may even start to shake. If she keeps pushing, I get angry and start to sulk. You don’t need to be a rocket (lettuce) scientist to predict that this doesn’t help.

We seem to be prone to this kind of problem where my memory causes grief. For example, I recently got the title of Marie’s book wrong, a small but emotionally significant error. And annoyingly I can remember a similar recent argument, but I can’t remember any of the details (and this is not a joke).

My psychologist has told me that this sort of thing is quite possibly not actually a memory issue but a question of not paying attention. The problem is that Parkinson’s makes it hard to multitask, so if I’ve been told something during a walk in the woods, I may not remember what was said as I was too focused on the task of walking. Which is of course annoying for Marie, who may feel that she talked to me at a time with few distractions as we were all alone in the woods.

Anyway, the latest row has passed and we are now friends again, just in time for me to bugger off to the UK tomorrow for a boys-only weekend. We used to be able to keep a row going for days, sometimes weeks, but (like erections) they just don’t seem to last as long these days.