At a post-Brexit party the other night, full of friends and acquaintances from my distant past as a political journalist, a woman bowled up to me and exclaimed: ‘Tom Utley! How lovely to see you!’
As so often on such occasions, I felt an ice-cold claw of panic.
There was something vaguely familiar about this woman. But who on Earth she was, or how I knew her, I just hadn’t a clue.
From the extreme warmth of her greeting, however, I judged that we must have been very good friends long ago. So I threw my arms around her, planted two loving kisses on her cheeks and said: ‘What a joy to see you!’
The woman seemed taken aback by my effusive display of affection.
‘Um, I recognised you from your photograph in the paper,’ she said.
‘I just wanted to tell you that my mother is a fan of your column.’
Embarrassed
In that awful moment, I realised this woman’s face rang a faint bell only because she was a Government frontbencher, whom I had seen occasionally on the telly (though I still can’t remember her name). Certainly, we’d never met before.
She must have gone away thinking I was some sort of dangerous lunatic, who goes around lavishing hugs and kisses on unsuspecting members of Her Majesty’s Privy Council.
Police Community Support Officer Andy Pope (pictured) is considered a ‘super-recognisers’ after he identified a criminal two full years after first seeing his picture
Enough to say that I will not be applying for a retirement job in the police as one of its ‘super-recognisers’.
This is the specialist group of officers who never forget a face — one of whose number, we learned this week, has caught almost 2,000 suspects simply by studying CCTV images and linking people who appear in them to previously unsolved crimes.
In one case, apparently, Police Community Support Officer Andy Pope identified a criminal two full years after first seeing his picture. He recognised another simply from a mole on his face.
Well, if PCSO Pope is a super-recogniser, then I must throw up my hands and confess that I am a super-forgetter.
Again and again, I’ve been horribly embarrassed by my inability to recognise a face, let alone put a name to it. Increasingly often these days, people I could swear I’ve never met in my life turn out to be long-lost friends, to whom I was once very close.
As my fellow sufferers will testify, super-forgetfulness ranks almost with deafness (and I’m increasingly prone to that, too) as a crippling social disability.
I’m not only thinking of gatherings such as that party I mentioned, or college reunions thronged with people I’ve not seen for decades.
On these occasions, at least, we super-forgetters have the excuse that people’s faces change over the years (though I often think that many sticky moments could still be averted if only it were made compulsory by law to issue all guests at such functions with name-tags printed in large type).
No, it’s worst of all when I bump into people I’ve last seen only a few days or weeks ago.
This is particularly true when I meet them out of context: a fellow regular at the pub, for example, if he greets me when I’m walking the dog in the park, or the cheery local window-cleaner when he’s standing behind me in the queue at the supermarket checkout.
My brain goes into overdrive, telling me I know these people — but who the devil are they, where have we met and why?
It’s come to the point where I dread the approach of a friendly looking face when I’m waiting for my train at the station.
Sir Thomas Beecham (pictured alongside his wife) told a famous story of the great conductor’s meeting with a faintly familiar-looking woman on a train who turned out to be Princess Mary, sister of George VI
Oh, Lord, do I know this person? Was I chatting to her, perhaps, at the Worthingtons the other night — and will I be condemned to sit with her all the way to Victoria, grilling her for clues to her identity?
Over the years, I’ve toyed with many ways of dealing with my disability, but none has been wholly satisfactory.
One possibility, of course, is for super-forgetters to come straight out with the truth and say: ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I have an appalling memory for names and faces and I simply can’t remember who you are or why we know each other.’
But how silly we look — not to mention rude — if the answer comes back: ‘I’m Olivia, your niece’; or: ‘You worked for me for two years, Tom, when I was the editor of the Financial Times.’
Stuck
On the other hand, as my experience with that minister illustrates, we can land ourselves in similar embarrassment if we pretend to know who we’re talking to, when we don’t.
It’s what we might call the Sir Thomas Beecham Syndrome, after the famous story of the great conductor’s meeting with a faintly familiar-looking woman on a train.
‘Ah, hello, how are you?’ he said.
‘I’m very well, thank you,’ replied the lady. ‘But I’m afraid my brother has been rather ill lately.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ said Sir Thomas, adding: ‘Um, what’s your brother up to at the moment?’
‘Oh… still King,’ replied Princess Mary, sister of George VI.
All right, this is an extreme example. But when we seek clues to people’s identity by asking about their parents, husbands or children, there’s always the risk that the answer will come back: ‘Didn’t I tell you? He died a fortnight ago.’
An alternative solution to the problem, much favoured by actors and actresses, is to avoid the necessity of addressing anyone by name simply by calling everyone ‘darling’.
But I wouldn’t advise this to anyone outside the acting profession. In these days of #MeToo, come to think of it, it may even be going out of fashion among the luvvies themselves.
Whatever the truth, I imagine that the minister who greeted me the other night would not have thought much better of me if I’d called her darling, instead of smothering her with kisses.
As it happens, a dear friend of mine — a worse super-forgetter even than I — has come up with his own variation on the actors’ solution.
When he’s stuck for a name, which is pretty well always, he calls people Michael — men and women alike.
Apparently, he adopted this practice in a job he had many years ago, in an office where he worked alongside an unusually large number of people who really were called Michael.
Well, this may have worked in his old job, where the laws of chance meant he occasionally struck lucky.
But I can assure him it’s no good at our local, where he’s surrounded by people called Chris, Simon, Abbie, John, Zoe, and Tom.
Memories
Women, in particular, give him very odd looks when he calls them Michael.
A better option, I reckon, is one I saw recommended by a magazine agony aunt. She suggested that, when we forget who people are, we should simply call them ‘you’, laying great stress on the word — ‘Hello, you!’
Add an emphatic tilt of the head, rather as I did with the minister after I’d hugged her, and the pronoun may be taken to mean anything from fond memories of times past to sympathy over the death of a loved one.
But there’s a catch there, too. Yes, ‘Hello you!’ may get us through the introductions, but the longer a conversation goes on, the clearer it inevitably becomes that we haven’t a clue who we’re talking to.
My only hope now is that technology will come to our aid.
Indeed, it can already help us super-forgetters a little, if we happen to have our mysterious acquaintance’s long-forgotten details in our mobile phone.
We need only say: ‘Oooh! I don’t think I’ve got your mobile number. Could you ring mine?’ — and bingo! his name will come up on your screen.
Otherwise, I’m looking forward to the day when the scientists perfect facial recognition technology, so that it can whisper discreetly the full details of anyone I meet.
True, it will put super-recognisers such as PCSO Pope out of a job. But what a boon it would be to people like me if a reassuring little voice would identify that minister of the Crown — and warn me not to hug her.