My subject is memory. Occasionally names or concepts fail to come to mind when I want them to. Sometimes I have struggled to remember the names of actresses, like the one who played Bubble in “Absolutely Fabulous” and the woman who played Cassie in the original UK series of “House of Cards”. Similarly, about five years ago I took a while to remember the name of the concept that suggests that even if you do not believe in God you should take a gamble and act as if He exists. The stakes here are pretty high. If there is a God and you refuse to believe in Him you risk an eternity in Hell. If you live a life consistent with the existence of God your reward might well be a place in Heaven instead. For eternity.

Pascal’s Wager: that’s what it’s called, and the name of the concept has usually come to mind when required in the last few years. There was, however, a time about a year ago when I couldn’t remember. I asked my daughter if she knew about that philosophical concept, where … Before I got too far in my description she was there already: “You mean Pascal’s Wager?” She had learnt about it independently from me, which pleased me no end.

I recall very clearly a time I time in 1996 when I couldn’t remember the names of either actress mentioned in the first paragraph here. It was so uncharacteristic that I wondered if it was a sign of something. Would I become the kind of person who can’t remember names and places? How quickly would my memory deteriorate? Nearly 30 years later and things haven’t got noticeably worse. I could recall both names easily enough just now: Jane Horrocks played Bubble, Susannah Harker was in “House of Cards”, and the 1995 BBC adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” among other things.

It looks like, for now, failing to remember the name of someone whose work I have encountered is still fairly rare. It’s not an everyday occurrence. There are obscure facts that do not come to mind easily but often they are things that I have only come across in quizzes. If I have read a book by someone, or seen them star in a film or TV show, I am likely to remember their name. An exception to this recently was the author David Spiegelhalter. I wrote about him on this Blog back in 2016, just before reading “The Norm Chronicles”, a book he wrote with Michael Blastland (published in 2013). Spiegelhalter is a leading statistician and was on the radio regularly during lockdown. He was also on an episode of “Winter Wipeout” which was repeated around the same time. My children enjoyed watching it so much that we kept it on series record for a year or two. I was surprised to find that a Cambridge-based statistician was so keen to be on the show.

I have not heard him on the radio for a while, and I was trying to remember his surname. Nothing. I knew that I could have found the information on this Blog easily enough but I wanted to see if and when the name came to me. This was a day or two before Christmas. I didn’t think about it again. Two days after Christmas (a Saturday) I went for a walk locally. People often leave books, CDs, DVDs and items of furniture outside their houses for anyone who wants them. Middle-class fly-tipping is how it was once described on Jeremy Vine’s show on BBC Radio 2. On its own, outside a house about 10 minutes walk away, was a book called “Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour”. Yours for free if you’d been walking down the street that afternoon. I looked at the cover. The author was David Spiegelhalter, as you might have known already, or might have guessed based on the words above. So, without me looking out for him, his name appeared before me in unexpected circumstances. It was the only book I noticed on my walk that day. I left it where it was. I have not sought it out since then, so cannot recommend it from personal experience. I can recommend “The Norm Chronicles” though. As I wrote back in 2016, it’s an “entertaining and detailed look at risk and the different ways we can either extend or shorten our life expectancy”.