I’m scrambling along the sidewalks outside Old Street Station in London because it’s happened again. What was the name of the pub? I can’t remember offhand, and that’s why I’m frantically pushing the cursor on Google Street View, exploring the side streets north of the Royal Artillery Company. There are classically styled building frontages I’m beginning to remember, which is odd because I’ve only been there once. I can remember some of the personnel from the session. Anita, Matt Curtis, Susanna Forbes, maybe Susan Boyle. Where’s the pub? Didn’t it have a rooftop terrace? A switch to satellite view makes it The Old Fountain. 

It’s nice to see that the pub is doing well, considering. They have beer to go from online sales at the moment (out of nearly everything but Oakham Citra), but there’s no mention of the bar snacks. I don’t quite remember which brand of pork crackling it was. It’s a hip London craft beer pub near Hackney, so it’s probably not the basic model. What I remember is the texture, dry enough to turn bitter and ashen in your mouth and whether it’s an older bag or whether it is just the brand itself I don’t and can’t know. The man sitting to my left had given me fair warning. 

Why do I care about this? Well, thirty minutes prior it had happened again. Since about April, I’ve been getting periodic involuntary flashes of autobiographical memory; awfully specific granular moments of sensory memory brought on by some random set of variables in my environment. It’s the kind of thing Proust wrote about, essentially a limited kind of Hyperthymesia, which in my case seems to be focused specifically around moments with food and drink. 

I’ll give you an example; One day in late April, I was lying across my bed staring idly out the window and the quality of the temperature and humidity of the air and possibly the time of day threw me backwards in time to one late spring day in something like 2008. I was working for a publishing company on Dundonald Street and had walked over to the Yorkville Whole Foods to see what I might be able to find for lunch. It ended up being White Turkey Chili and Jalapeno Cornbread.

Even though it was good, I cannot suggest to you that it is an important enough experience to be lodged in my memory in such a way. Why your brain would make you time travel to a point that distant and indistinct in terms of importance is extremely puzzling. It reminds me of the Stephen Wright joke: “I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”

Over the course of the summer this has happened just frequently enough to be annoying. I’ve had the smell of these specific trees in a heat wave as I headed north across Blackfriars bridge in 2018. I’ve had the texture of a plain quarter pounder with cheese from McDonald’s ca. Early autumn 1998. I’ve had burnt hot dog specifically in a top cut bun in Maine (triggered apparently by staring at a plaque commemorating Canadian author Morley Callaghan). I’ve had, very simply, the smell of a cut lime about to go in a gin and tonic and Cape Cod Kettle Chips ca. 1986 in Scarborough, Maine and thought I was going mad because the current branding doesn’t have the seagull anymore. Vegetarian glass noodles at what must have been the Po Lin monastery. Smoked cheese for breakfast on the Pest side of the Danube.

I’ve had a pint of Otley 01 (no longer exists) at The Rake in Borough Market with black pudding and mustard flavoured crisps. I’ve had a pint of Fuller’s Steam Effort (a 2018 one off with Redemption) at The Harp Covent Garden triggered by the consideration of whether to put Anchor Steam in the online version of the George Brown course. I’ve had a mixed grill at the Crown and Greyhound in Dulwich, and had to consult with my dining companion from February of 2008 on which kind of mustard he thought might have been on the table (we think Keen’s). I’ve had Worthington Red Shield on cask at the Brewing Museum in Burton on Trent with a hummus and spicy chorizo platter. Good pairing, as it turns out.

There are more. Just yesterday, walking along through Rosedale during the unseasonably warm day with fallen leaves and that particular quality of moist earth and the onset of decay reminded me of Association Day from school where we would all play football on very small pitches and specifically of the gait of a classmate of mine from about grade six chasing down the ball at full tilt.

The initial flash lasts only a few seconds, but the consequential time is more pervasive lasting anywhere up to several hours. It’s not substantially mood altering, although there is a little anger at the involuntary nature of it, since it’s not beckoned or controllable. They’re very vivid to the point of practical recreation. From the minute detail you can build an entire scene.

Which is great, unless you have something to do. Or you land on “that time I sprained my ankle.”

I have two working theories, which sort of conjoin.

One is that I am, for better or for worse, a sensory professional and writer at this point. I review things in the normal course of affairs. It involves going places and doing things and acquiring new data which is minutely recorded in both written notes and memory. The fact that there’s nowhere to go and not a great deal of new input might mean that you’re getting involuntary hippocampal activity in its stead; a sort of autobiographical filing cabinet being sorted.

Second, I note that the majority of these things happen in states of heightened stress. Now that I think about it, that Whole Foods might have been my first time in a new upscale grocery store, and that’s not exactly baseline. I’m not sure about you, but for me vacations tend not to be quite the relaxing affair people claim. Usually I’m on a busman’s holiday and working away. It’s possible that the heightened stress level of COVID-19 is similar to that of travel and that the condition of that heightened emotional state is similar to the state you’d be in when recording detail. I’m not sure everyone who does this works quite that way.

The reason I mention it is because I haven’t seen anyone else mentioning it, and I wonder whether if I write about it a little there might be other people with the same small issue.

In the meantime, my intention is to lean into it a little and see whether I can’t review things more frequently on instagram or detail some palate building techniques for people in order to give the mill some grist. The lack of activity seems to result in spun wheels, and whether paid or not, momentum seems to help.