Self Doubt in the Lounge Bar

I had the most extraordinary conversation last night. If you could call it a conversation, it was all pretty one sided and left me somewhat confused. But, as ever, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning: I was in the pub being depressed by a conversation with Techno Barry, when, somehow, the subject of my home town came up, (as I may have mentioned before, I'm not a native of Crapchester, I moved here for work some years ago), and this bloke at the bar, who I vaguely remember seeing in the pub before, suddenly says that he's originally from the same town as me. Nothing unusual in that. But he then goes on to say that, as this is the case, he's surprised that he doesn't know me. Now, the town, (actually, it's a city, one of the oldest in the country), that I come from had a population of around 40,000 when I last lived there. It's probably more by now. Curiously enough, I don't know all of them. Indeed, despite living there for twenty eight years, I probably never met more than a tiny percentage of the town's population. So the chances of me knowing some random fellow inhabitant I encounter by chance in a Crapchester pub on a Thursday evening in March, are pretty remote!

Not that such statistics seemed to deter this guy, who clearly felt he had to account for the fact that we were complete strangers despite having, by coincidence of birth, come from the same city. He started to question me as to which school I had been to, specifically if I had been to the town's main comprehensive. Now, as it happens, I'm a grammar school boy. So was he, he claimed. Which simply reinforced his opinion that he should know me. He seemed amazed that I couldn't remember, off the top of my head, the year I left the school. (Strangely enough, I don't have perfect recall of the exact years things happened to me - other than the year of my birth - I couldn't for instance, tell you what year I had my first wank, I just don't think it essential to know these things. After all, my personal history is never likely to be the subject of an exam, is it?) Anyway, it eventually transpires that he left three years before I did. Again, this seemed to fuel his belief he should recognise me. Quite why he thought that I should know someone who was three years ahead of me at school (a school with 800+ pupils) I don't know. Like most people, I only tended to know people in my own year. Besides, I always thought the older kids were arseholes. Getting back to the point, he was, by now, quite clearly doubting that I was telling the truth! Before it could all get nasty, Techno Barry butted in and changed the subject. Never before have I felt grateful for those waves of depression washing back over me!

After this the bloke loitered for a while, before finishing his beer and buggering off. For which I was also grateful. The fact is that I'd found the whole experience somewhat disturbing. His clear implication that I was lying about my past left me beginning to doubt my own memories. Had I, in fact, invented my entire self history, possibly as a result of some psychological trauma in my past? Or were they all implanted memories, to cover up some secret past life as a government assassin? Or was I just delusional? Mind you, I have to say that if I was going to completely fabricate a past, surely I would have come up with something more exciting than attending the grammar school in a provincial English market town, wouldn't I? I'm sure I would have made up a past which involved me being some fabulously wealthy rock star, who had spent their days snorting cocaine and shagging supermodels. (Actually, would that be a good thing - shagging the supermodels, I mean - they all look so miserable and skinny, not fun at all). Then again, maybe that's the kind of guy I am - so dull that even my fantasised past lives are boring!