My trick for remembering names is a bit dodgy. Just ask ‘pooork Sarah’

Aides-memoire are rats cloaked as puppies and will bite your arse. I was once acquainted with a bloke named Fred, a man who swooned at mirrors and who knew his cholesterol level to the third decimal place. He was a grandee of sorts, a man who had to be reckoned with because he was high up in the general scheme of things.

When meeting him, free drink in hand at a send-off, a launch, a publisher’s binge, a premiere, or some other wordy conclave where the backbiters feast on vertebrae, I’d always forget his name. He’d bristle and roll his shoulders as if limbering for combat. “It is Frederick, Anson. But just go with ‘Fred’ if the entire three syllables are too taxing for you.”

Credit: Robin Cowcher

I decided to remember his name by pairing him in my mind with a famous Fred. I should have used Flintstone, Weasley, Astaire, or The Great. But I chose Freddie Mercury because this guy was gay, and when I think of Freddie Mercury, I think not only of his toothy high jinks upfront of Queen, but of the more commendable mano-a-mano-a-mano sexcapades for which he became so justly celebrated. So, a gay Freddie was an aide-memoire par excellence for this fellow, I thought.

But when I next ran into him, I fell into a mnemonic panic, my aide-memoire said “au revoir”, and reaching out to the ghost of F. Mercury for help, I found him gone – and I called this man Dick. Which I quickly corrected to Peter. For me, word association turns out to be about as safe as having a ripped gibbon working railway points – the train of thought might go this way, or that … or off the rails entirely.

I made a similar, but mightier, faux pas two decades earlier when having trouble remembering the name of a Sarah who sometimes passed through the outer fringe of my social orbit. She was a flame-haired publicist with a wide face and a lovely smile. I admitted to a friend that I always froze over her name and the friend said: “Use an aide-memoire. What I do is I think of a famous person who has the same name as the name of the person I’m forgetting. In this case why not use Sarah Ferguson, The Duchess of York? Just think ‘Duchess’ and ‘Sarah’ will come to mind.”

It seemed like a good idea, and might have worked without Rupert Murdoch’s interference. Because the Duchess of York had, back then in a pre-Ozempic epoch, put on some post-natal condition. And Rupert’s witty minions, who were daily flailing the royals in the tabloids for the public’s glee, had taken to headlining her as The Duchess of Pork. I must have subconsciously adopted this crude epithet for Sarah Ferguson, and the next time I met the publicist, I said, “Hi ... umm ... pork ... pooork ... Sarah.”

The upside was I’d finally remembered her name – but the dual “porks” preceding it (one spat out like a hot lychee, and the other crooned lengthily to give my spooked mind time to unmask “Sarah”) were impossible to retract. Worse, it sounded as if I’d blurted a nickname used behind her back, because, I mean, no one just comes up with “Pork Pooork Sarah” out of the blue. She had the presence of mind to reply, “Hello, Arse ... Arrrse ... Anson.” And we laughed, each of us realising we were enemies now.

Once you concede to yourself that you’ve forgotten someone’s name, this vacuum, this blank, becomes their hideous disfigurement. Forget the whereabouts of your daughter’s boss’ missing eye – where’s his name? As I step to him with my hand extended, the klaxons of social emergency start up in my brain, drowning out any helpful echo from the past.

But if I forget your name, I want you to take it as a compliment. The name of a nobody slides off the tongue like a regurgitated oyster. It’s the name of some bigwig Barry I can’t afford to forget that conceals itself among the Harrys, Barts, Gerrys, Clarrys, Berts, Humphreys and other shuffling nomenclature in the lobby of my brain. So the next time we meet and I expose my amber incisors by blurting “G’day, Cocko”, or “Hola, friend”, remember, I am a frightened nobody and you’re a luminary who has got names spinning behind my eyes like rhinos, cherries and aces on an addict’s poker machine. About 80 per cent of you will, in any case, call me “An ... An … Anton.”

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