Early Saturday morning I had a dream.

I was trying to explain something to someone but couldn’t remember names. I stammered and stalled and, just when a noun had begun to form in my mind, it was gone like snow on the water. Nouns—names, dates, places—are my stock in trade but they hid from me, just round the corner, barely outlined in a shadowed corner of my recollection.

On waking, I wondered if this had been a brush with Mr Alzheimer.  I only half-joke about OTD—Old Timers’ Disease—because those nouns are as important to me as my sight. I wonder if my future might become the inverse of Saturday’s dream: Will my days be clouded recollection and my nights the sleep of clarity?

I fear this more than any physical infirmity.