As it happens, I probably shouldn’t have gone. My girlfriend at the time had wanted me to go to Australia
with her that summer but for reasons that caused strife at the time and seem fairly daft now, I decided
against it.
Consequently, I ended up going with my folks and my brother to the French Alps, where I got a filthy cold
and generally moped about, feeling regretful. All of that I remember well.
Weather-wise, we were unlucky, which didn’t help my brooding. A few days were completely lost to rain. In
the pre-internet era, books and scrabble did their best to keep us entertained.
When the clouds dispersed, we put on our boots and got into the mountains. But really, I only know this
because it must have happened – it’s what we did.
In fact though, as well as not being able to remember the route my mother described to me the other day, I
actually couldn’t tell you a particularly defining feature of any walk we did that fortnight.
Yet for mum, it is all as clear as day.
What have I seen but not stored; what have I been told but now forgotten?
The walk up the valley, the steep path between glaciers, passing gentians, edelweiss, erigeron and
multitudes of geranium. On the descent we crossed a dried lake covered with pink moss campion and I
apparently hung back to help Mum where scree made the going difficult, while my father marched ahead
(my brother having not joined us that day).
And then, the grand finale – something of a classic you’d think: getting back to the hire car to find that Dad
had locked the keys inside. A local mechanic was called and swiftly jimmied the thing open with a strip of
metal. It was only when my mother recounted this detail that a vague bell jangled somewhere at the very
back of my mind.
The discussion of this lost walk made me wonder how much else of my life has been discarded by the
memory bank.
What have I seen but not stored; what have I been told but now forgotten? If moments have gone
unnoticed, were they really felt at all?
But then, we all have our own narratives; our individual takes on even the most shared of experiences. In
our own versions of the same tale, we are each to the fore, our successes and our concerns taking
precedence.
Where my mother breathed the sweet Alpine air and took in every wildflower in the Savoie, I evidently day-
dreamed of Australia and looked at my laces.
There are no absolutes in our human stories. Only the mountains are immutable.