A digital billboard on Punt Road switches ads every 30 seconds. Last week, with State of Origin in town, a familiar face promoted an energy drink. I knew that face, and the athlete owning it, yet his name refused to come.
This was a worry. As an NRL fan living incognito in a Sherrin city, how could I forget the game’s greatest player? A halfback, a match winner: he’s the man to unpick any defence. I’ve seen him play 100 times, usually quelling my bamboozled Storm. But his name? Not there.
A blip, I argued. The symptom of a long day. Driving home late, I was defragging from three hours on air, talking about Ned Kelly and diabetes, jazz and cockatoos. My brain could be forgiven for waiving some random retrieval. Yet, I knew a superstar was lost in my grey matter.
At 64, was this the start? The end? Dad died at 83, living with frontal lobe dementia for years. Against that, mum just turned 94, her Wordle scores respectable. Which road was mine when reaching the junction?
Don’t panic, David. Remember Henry Brodaty, professor of ageing and mental health, who said: “We all become forgetful as we age. We forget where we put the car keys or people’s names. But it’s where loss of memory and other cognitive abilities lead to the interference of daily lives that people cross a line and say, ‘This is dementia’.”
Ivan – that was the player’s dad, the team’s coach. Ivan who, I asked, five blocks from the billboard. Did the surname start with K? Then there was the Matilda, his girlfriend, Mary Fowler, a spearhead in the forward line. My brain was getting warmer, potshots circling the clay pigeon.
Reviving those cockatoos, our first topic tonight. The brilliant birds can flip wheelie-bin lids to raid the trash inside. I’d spoken to Allan Walls, a retired salesman from Lorne who’d crafted a plastic apron to fringe each lid, stopping the parrots prising the bin open. As Allan said, “It’s like trying to lift a block of wood you’re already standing on.”
Maybe that was my memory problem. I was standing on the blockage trying to release the star. I let my thoughts wander to Monash University, its long-term study of 10,000 Australians aged 70 upwards. The ASPREE Project learnt that people “who routinely engaged in adult literacy and mental acuity tasks such as education, journal-keeping and crosswords were 9-11 per cent less likely to develop dementia than their peers”.
I keep a journal; I never stop learning; I make bloody crosswords. But nobody is bulletproof, I realised on the road home, this stupid lid not budging. Hence, my connection ploy. Next time you do a quiz, see how many questions you recall a day later. Only a minority, I’d wager, as the topics are scattershot.
Now do the same with yesterday’s crossword, and you can use one answer to fetch another. While the player’s dad or girlfriend didn’t do the trick, a bloke like Isaiah Yeo did. He’s a Penrith teammate, the skipper, and the linking player between dummy half and … Nathan Cleary. Bingo. Crisis averted. Postpone the clinic. For tonight, at least.
davidastle.com, twitter.com/dontattempt
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
