AIDE MEMOIRE

When did I come across the phrase 'aide memoire'? I am not sure.

Perhaps I learnt it at the Alliance Francaise where I had enrolled for a course in French when I was posted in Calcutta during the early days of my career. Or maybe I saw the word printed on the tiny cardboard box containing a corporate gift.

It was a small (6 x 10 cm) leather product which, on one side, had triangular pieces at the four corners to hold slips of paper in, and, on the other, a pocket for the spare slips. Its corners were reinforced with gold-coloured metallic beading and it had a leather loop which accommodated a tiny gold-coloured ballpoint pen.

As and when you remembered something — an item you want to add to the shopping list or a visit due — you pulled it out of your pocket and scrawled on the slip. It doubled as a place where you could "park" information that you may need in future: the phone number of your pharmacist, the arrival time of a train, a new word you learnt.

In course of time, the aide memoire was worn out and had to be discarded, but the habit stuck. A small spiral notebook took its place. You were spoilt for choice: exclusive ones in bond paper from Oxford Stationery in Park Street to the inexpensive ones sold by the hawkers in Esplanade or Dalhousie Square.

In my working days, I used to maintain two such books — one for official matters and the other for personal life. The former would get exhausted six times as fast as the latter, more or less reflecting the proportion of time I spent on the respective spheres of my activity. I would buy a dozen small spiral notebooks and replenish the stocks when they got depleted. On my retirement, the number of notebooks in use at a time was back to one.

One of the side-effects, if I may use the term, of Covid-19 is that replenishment of stocks became a casualty. One went out only if inevitable and returned as soon as the objective of the outing was accomplished "without pottering about in stationery shops" (quoting the strict instructions from the certainly better half).

So one had to make do with slips of paper made at home by cutting A4 sheets into sixteen equal pieces. The trouble with these chits is that they have this nasty habit of getting misplaced or scattered. They fly off the table, get lodged inside magazines and newspapers, or sometimes simply perform the vanishing act!

So much so that when you want to add one more item to the one you wrote on, you can't find it. So you make another, and another, and yet another, of course at different times, ad infinitum and end up with several chits. You write the same thing over and over again on several slips — all of which get lost unless they are used as bookmarks.

These slips are the cause of the intermittent civil wars at home: when I tell my wife that I am unable to locate a particular slip, she complains that she will soon drown in the gadzillion slips floating around. "Use Post-it slips, for heaven's sake! They will at least sit in one place, and not flit about like gadflies in the troposphere," says the significant one. "What's the fun, then?" I respond. In my saner moments, though, I do realise that she has a point: the chits far outnumber the items I have noted on them!

So you decide you will consolidate them all into one and destroy the others. (Remember WWI being described by HG Wells as "the war to end all wars"? Likewise, my fond hope is that this would be a slip to end all slips.) But you can't do that till you can find them all — at the same time, which is never.