little red smoking hood

I wish the brain had a little built-in audio recorder with a couple-of-second loop running to memory to record a couple of seconds prior to activation, very similar to the handy and thus doomed device once shown on Tomorrow's World consisting of a dictaphone with eight seconds' anticipatory solid-state memory back in the days when the expense of providing enough memory for eight seconds of reasonably high sample-rate audio would have made the device horribly expensive and probably unmarketable, especially when the results of the advantage of it being able to record the eight seconds prior to the record button being pressed would generally consist of a couple of seconds of muffled whatever-it-is-you-thought-would-be-worth-recording, a muffled slide of hand-reaching-into-pocket and the click of the record button being pressed then the sound of the device being removed from the pocket in time to catch the less noteworthy remainder of the conversation. I'd like to know how Michael Holden operates - record of them in audio form, notes in audio form, live transcription into written form or later notes in written form taken from working memory very shortly after the occurrence? Sometimes I have a notepad to hand at the time but it was no use this afternoon when to retrieve it would have mean de-minimising my profile in a fairly cramped shop which was small enough to have made it likely that someone retrieving and writing in a notebook would have been noticeable, even to the vacuous yah who was saying various daft things to a woman she then amusingly addressed as (and this is, like for real) "Mumsie". In public. Quite loudly. I heard something else in passing earlier and didn't make any effort to imprint it upon my brain so it shall remain forgotten and as unrecorded as the images of the sunglasses-wearing coffee-booth operative I passed this evening who was leaning attitudinously out over his counter into the damp evening and the slap-coated, hair-dressed and generally dolled-up teenager moping underneath a fishmonger's white hat, underneath a fishmonger's white coat and on the staff-hand-side of a fishmonger's fish-based window display. Though I did at least remember them. Blips of the mind indeed.

Anyway, I occasionally resolve to be more active in recording what I think as I'm thinking it whilst I can still remember everything including the original means of explaining and phrasing it and so shall make sure I have a notebook in an accessible place more often in the future. I shall have to learn to cultivate an air of making-notes-about-what-to-get-people-for-christmas so that it appears neither that I'm writing down what people are saying nor recording what I'm thinking in case I forget it like some form of codger.