Wounded Knee!

I'm thinking about heading South this Sunday, to tackle my first Munro. The one I have in mind is Schiehallion, a little bit West of Pitlochry. There are plenty Munro's much closer to home, but the ones further North are all snow-covered right now, and that's not really suitable for beginners. There is also the problem of my lingering knee pain, first it was the left knee, now it's the right. Unfortunately, I have had problems with the right knee in the past, so I'm kind of hoping I haven't awoken a sleeping lion there.

Watched "The Real Indiana Jones" on Channel 5 the other night, quite interesting. It seems to be that Indiana Jones is based on real-life adventurers, although not directly as you might have expected. Instead, it seems that Lucas and Spielberg based the character on their recollections of "Matinees" that they both watched as children. These shows featured all action heroes and clear distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. The shows were of course based on real characters, not that Spielberg or Lucas might have known that. They simply had a T.V. diet on which they thrived. So Indie is a third-hand version of a hotch-potch of early 20th Century adventurers and explorers.

I've another week or so before I'm back in school for a five week run, at the end of which that will be me, virtually a teacher, although only provisionally for the first year, but at least I'll start getting paid. This course has been a hard slog. You can tell from the drop-out rate, and even amongst those that will finish, I have heard many of them saying that they don't plan to take up teaching places after the Summer, on all sorts of pretexts. The most likely route for many will be to simply finish the course, and never teach at all, because they don't want to quit so close to the finish, but they've already decided that teaching's not for them!

False Memory Syndrome?

Someone in my family is suffering from "False Memory Syndrome" and I'm fairly sure it isn't me! My brother increasingly diverges in his versions of events which occured in our childhood, from the manner in which I recall those same events. It's been going on for the last few years and it's getting to the stage where he's trying to convince me that I'm the one who can't remember, when I know damn well my recollections are accurate.

However, he does suffer from bizzare dreams, which he then ties to real events. In other words, he thinks he's prophetic. So clearly, in my opinion, someone who intertwines dreams with reality in such a way, is far more likely to recall real events other than they actually happened.

For instance, I related to him certain things a family member had done (nothing too sinister I assure you), and his response was that he couldn't believe that such a person would have done those things. Fair enough. He clearly saw this person in a different light from me, but that was because he couldn't be objective, having a closer realtionship with that person than I have. So far, it's all fairly comprehensible, but then he took it up a notch.

I was talking about something that happened to me when I was younger, some major event, and he said that it had happened differently. I told him he couldn't possibly know because he wasn't there. His reply was that he was definitely there, it was me that wasn't there, and he was adamant about it. I was dumbfounded by this. It seems to me that he'd heard this story I'd probably talked about many times, and somehow made himself into the main protagonist. I guess my vivid description had allowed it to happen. That and his susceptibility to mental suggestion. I wonder if this is how False Memory Syndrome works? That combined with several obssessive compulsive behaviours he displays, suggests to me that it is indeed!