Nicholas Fearn

If one ever wonders just how important memory is to our selfhood, consider patients in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The condition as good as demonstrates that there is no afterlife, because if you can be dead when you are alive, then you can certainly be dead when you are dead. Without memory our minds are nothing, which should have made the cynical among us realise long ago that something so important could not possibly be fully under our control. According to the research psychologist Daniel Schacter, memory is far from the passive aide we imagine — the dutiful if fallible servant who hopefully brings us what we need, when we need it.

In the summer, I met a man who made his living by selling computer hardware he found discarded around London's business districts. A Scorpion tank driver during the Gulf war, he told me how he had been wounded in a firefight and now found himself unequipped for ordinary employment. Soldiers who have seen action are not supposed to enjoy talking about their experiences, so I took him for a fantasist, until he pulled down the neck of his t-shirt and showed me his bullet wounds. The man may have risked his life for a cheap oil supply and the restoration of a despotic government, but he had come out of it with some good stories to tell - and this was recompense enough. Not every combat veteran conforms to the popular image of quiet dignity.