Memory Bank

Earliest Memory

My very earliest memory — my first actual instance of self-awareness, in fact — is of whooping and laughing and running, all scabby knees and dungarees, sunwards through a lush grassy meadow.

… A caveat: the ‘grassy meadow’ I’m referencing was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was the garden of a pub/hotel in my hometown of Bathgate called ‘The Kaim Park.’ I was probably less than five meters away from my mum and dad, who would have sitting at a bench nearby and basking in the extremely rare Scottish sunshine. The garden (which is still there today, looking onto Tesco’s car park) isn’t even that big really. Nowadays, I could sprint across it and back again in less than 15 seconds. If any of you were to see this supposedly-Arcadian pasture in real life, you’d be pretty underwhelmed. Constable wouldn’t have deigned to paint it, put it that way.

But we all know that piddly little places like that really do seem immense when you’re a toddler. A modest shopping centre is incomprehensibly vast to a small child. A local park might as well be the Forest of Dean. The average house feels like a sprawling manor, with countless nooks and crannies totally unknown to grown-ups.

So, in my mind, that wee patch of grass was like an open prairie. And, maybe because this was my first real moment of consciousness, everything in this unspooling reel of mental cinema seems deliciously vivid. The sky was a pure cerulean blue, the sun as golden as a yoke. The deep lungfuls of air I drew between childish giggles felt fresher and cleaner than any I’ve experienced since. Considering the state of the planet now, I wouldn’t even be surprised if that were true.

Though I remember running, it wasn’t a graceful grown-up stride by the way. I must have been three. So I was doing that special kid’s scurry where balance is an afterthought; the kind of stumbling run that seems more like an indefinitely-postponed collapse. I remember my chubby hands catching tall stems of grass and stripping the seeds from the spikelets with my thumbnail, relishing the sensation of them popping and scattering in the breeze.

I must have been running towards the train tracks because I was obsessed with trains when I was a wee lad, and what right-thinking three-year-old isn’t? Obviously I couldn’t reach them: there was thankfully a very sturdy metal fence preventing any ambulant wains from being splattered by the 2.32 service to Waverley.

But, at some point, I must have stopped my mad dash towards choo-choo territory, looked around me, and actually taken in my surroundings. Instead of acting instinctually to stimuli, I became aware of the world around me, that I was part of it, and that I was experiencing it all in this perfect moment. A moment so pure and full of wonder that I can recall it still.

I like to think that that bright day, that second-rate Eden, those smells and sights and feelings within me, was all so beautiful that it brought a real person into being. Everything combined in just the right way to make me understand that I, Callum, was alive and present in a world where my thoughts and experiences were uniquely mine, and that time was passing. That the incumbent moment would vanish at inception of the next. That the actions of the present fashioned the future. That I was already growing up and growing older and everything I knew was ephemeral. I was suddenly like a computer coming online in that microsecond: engaged, loaded, all systems go.

Before, I’d merely been alive. Now I was awake.

That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? That’s the kind of enlightenment or higher understanding, that we’d typically expect from a guru or a saint or a Jedi master. Yet, all over the world, at this very moment, as they shite their breeks or fling yoghurt at the walls or drop daddy’s phone down the toilet, countless tiny ankle-biters are all having the same mind-shattering revelation. And we adults don’t even notice.

For me, that’s where all the trouble started: self-awareness.

But we’ll get to that later. All I’ll say for now is that I’m actually pretty proud that my earliest memory is something so sweet and picturesque, even if it’s by complete co-incidence. I suppose it could have been a lot worse.