Memory recovery

Last night we watched the second and third parts of the Hickson rendition of 'A Murder is Announced', a story we have watched several times before, in at least two different versions.

An entirely watchable bit of television drama, which being thirty years old did not have to work quite so hard to recreate a semblance of old-style village life. And being spread over three episodes, it seemed content to spread itself out over the original story, without feeling the need to work in quite so much extra material as would be the case if it were done now, contrariwise, within a much smaller compass. And it was fun to see the likes of Sergeant Lewis in a former life, as it happens in another role as somebody's sergeant.

However, the point of the post is the way that one recovered the story as one went through the two or three hours of it. We started out remembering about the announcement of the murder in the local paper, but that was about it. We then started remembering faces and roles, but without having any idea how they fitted into the story. Next up was the villain. So we knew that Miss. Blacklock was the villain, but without having any idea as to how or why. Then towards the end, we knew that it was something to do with her chunky pearl necklace, but ditto.

For some reason, I remembered fairly early on that both Miss. Murgatroyd and Miss. Bunner were going to be murdered, but did not manage to recover their details until rather later. So the bits and pieces of the jigsaw were gradually recovered, all to be slotted neatly into place by the end, when Miss. Marple did the summing up.

I wonder now how the process of remembering the story relates to the process of writing it in the first place and I suspect that there might well be quite a good correlation between the order of recovery of elements of the story and the order of their arriving in the mind of its creator. But I don't suppose we shall ever know. Is any writer of crime stories going to be prepared to lay out the secrets of their craft in the way that would be necessary? Could such a writer be bothered?

Another bit of memory recovery concerns Axel Munthe, a gentleman first stirred up back in May 2009, just about seven years ago now. And about all I could remember about him first off, that is to say the day before yesterday, was that he wrote a best-selling book about a house in the Mediterranean, perhaps Capri. My mother had had a copy of it, a fat & tatty orange book with the title in big black letters on the spine, now long lost. While we still have a copy of the book about the book by the Jangfeldt mentioned at reference 2.

This all cropped up because the Saturday DT included a place called Southside House on Wimbledon Common in its list of 20 must-visit chunks of built heritage, and somewhere along the line we picked up the trail of Munthe, correctly thinking that it must be the Capri one. It turns out that the house was once owned by his rather badly treated English wife Hilda, whom I had not remembered the existence of at all. But I did now remember that Munthe had a long standing but rather odd relationship with a lady member of the Swedish royal family.

I suppose that if I were to read Jangfeldt again, great chunks of stuff would start coming back from the back rooms and attics of my memory. Whether or not I shall bother remains to be seen.

The house looks quite interesting, but I am presently put off by it appearing to be a guided tour only place - guided tours of stately homes being something that I do not like at all. I remember being rather put out by having to do Blenheim Palace that way, although I can find no record of that visit.

PS: a little later, while kneading what turned into the 355th batch of bread, I turned over the thought from Miss. Marple about, if one gets seriously old, how all the people with whom one had past in common gradually died off and one got left with people who were, perhaps, kind & pleasant enough, but with whom one had little in common. It was no longer important whether one had liked these other people, or had spent quality time with them. What was important was that they were a link to a shared past, the loss of which seemed to matter. The sharing was an assertion of one's own past existence which one was loath to lose. Or is it all down to temperament and state of health? So long as you have a future, sharing the past is not very important?

Reference 1: for the murder see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087756/.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Munthe.

Reference 3: http://southsidehouse.com/.