Dumberer and Dumbererer.

When I was a kid I was smart, from the start I was smart. Right up until the teens kicked in I was quite satisfied with my own cleverness, always challenging for top of the class, rarely at a loss to understand anything that was set to me, head full of words, numbers and ideas that I could access with ease whenever the occasion called.

I wasn't a prodigy or any kind of exciting case study, I was just quite brain smart for my age, I read more than most, I found schoolwork fairly easy, I went the extra yard out of curiosity and learned stuff on my own, I was programming on my Spectrum 48K in Basic and not just getting over excited about the new racing game, although I did that too. Of course, I fully believed I was an exciting human being, almost some kind of super hero, and made sure those around me knew that, which obviously limited my popularity in exactly the way it should have, really I should have been thumped more often than I was.

Then I grew up and stopped being smart, at all. At 31, I haven't made a confident decision in weeks, I have to write down every thought as it comes to me or it goes away forever (as anyone on my Facebook will testify), I struggle to concentrate after more than a chapter or so of a book, when people ask me what my favourite something is? A film, a song, a comedian, a holiday, a friend, I don't know, because the only one I can clearly remember is the last one I thought about, or the first that pops into my head, I don't have full access to the big filing system in my brain anymore, I've been locked out, given restricted access. The other day I put a pie in the freezer... it wasn't a pie for freezing!

Saints alive, what is going on? Can I blame TV and the internet, or some form of undiagnosed condition that will be given a fancy name in a few years. Is this whole 'the brain is a muscle' malarky something I should be paying far more heed to? Or should I just let it happen, let my Freeview rest on E4, tattoo important information about my body and start taking photos of absolutely everything.

Of course, I don't know, maybe the nine year old me would, but I've no chance now.