Lists and Harry Potter spells

Do you keep lists?  In my advanced years, I've abandoned them. Never read them, never get to the end of them, can't see the point.

In my youth (think last century), an uncanny knack for remembering endless mundane details days, weeks, months in advance meant that I scorned the need for diaries, knowing that a dentist appointment at 08.45 in four months time; September 18th, for example, was on a Thursday and that I had a review meeting scheduled with another department later that day after the dentist and that I'd have to research ideas 1-10 on certain days before then; that baked beans had been omitted from the seemingly random names of potential food shop items floating around my head, that I had remembered to 'phone the plumber and that I could take work calls from home on Tuesday week when the fridge repair-man might deign to show up, having failed to do so two months earlier.

Slowly the written word as a memorandum became a necessity and lists pinned to the office wall or shoved in a purse increased in length, some items with arrows pointing to them to remind me of their importance. I wouldn't shop without one; babes, tooddler and teens either chewed, ripped or ignored them.  Supermarket lists came - and went - as quickly. Like many others, I enter a drug-like trance when entering any shop with over 20 square feet to its name and simply follow the designated route up and down each aisle. The obvious exception is the one with the most important item for that week, without which the household might collapse. That aisle has, Harry Potter style (apologies to JKR), some room of requirement spell cast over it which the flustered brain has no hope of remembering to summon. Thus, many an exhausted arrival home has been followed by exasperated cursing.

Now, I have a grading system, of sorts. Scraps of paper are often found stuffed into handbag pockets or slipped between telephone directories; hard to decipher and usually meaningless by the time they've been discovered. Larger pieces of paper with scrawled script lie by the computer, work reminders, 'don't forget to order oil' reminders. When times get tough and too many parallel thoughts threaten to intervene, long lists appear in the vain hope that some things listed will be crossed out. These lists are left on the kitchen table, next to the car keys, anywhere that might actually catch the eye amongst the clutter (hard in this house). It works - for a day or so. Days later I might find it in the dog's basket, with added lines in red biro or felt tip from a hopeful child.

So, I've given up. The result has been that I have managed to forget the birthdays of long-standing friends whose special days fall in the first few months of this year, I have a godson who is doubtless casting aspersions on the validity of his godparent - although I remember now that I've forgotten, I never remember to remember to do anything about it - I wonder daily whether the plumber has forgotten where we live and any day now we'll run out of oil, again.