Things You Forget

Was looking back in my journals again today, this time to the year 2003. But this wasn't the usual idle browsing to find out what the young me was up to 20, 15, 10 years back. This time my reading was prompted by a conversation with Peter over a cuppa in SAC. He was telling me that Su had mentioned to him the shutting down of schools here in the SARS scare and wondering if I remembered this since he couldn't. It turned out that my memory was worse than Pete's since I had the impression the SARS thing had happened after we'd both started teaching at our current place but he somehow knew that was the H1 N1 thing (I think that was what the virus was called) and that came later. He also knew that the SARS scare took place in 2003, which was actually two schools back for me. Disconcertingly I had no memory whatsoever of a school closure, but I mentioned I kept journals covering the period and I would look them up.

So I did. But I needed to google for info on the month(s) involved, duly discovering that, yes, the schools did close late in March, opening again in early April. Checking on what I actually wrote in the period, I found that I did reference the closure and expressed some awareness of the SARS situation, but not all that much. My concerns were largely elsewhere (of course, I and my family and friends were lucky not to be effected by the virus in any way) with the only reference evoking a distinct fragment of memory being one about Mum expressing concern over the whole situation in a phone call and needing to be reassured.

The days in question were filled with my usual references to music listened to and books read and the like, but there was one aspect of current affairs that clearly got my full attention - that being the war in Iraq (which I referred to then, quite rightly I think, as the 'illegal invasion'). And those references brought back a flood of memories. Funny how one's mind works.