I am not a neuro-surgeon but I met one once on the banks of the river while we were waiting for a cod to bite. We had been camped there for three days and de nada, nothing not even a carp. We chuckled about the local who stopped by yesterday asked how we were going. We told him no good and he came right back with, “You should have been here yesterday they were biting like hell, yep there were some good fish taken yesterday mate, just a day late mate.” “We were here yesterday,” we told him. “When” was his reply?  “In the afternoon,” we said. “Oh,” he said “then that explains it you should have been here in the morning!!! And off he went before we could say another thing to him.

My new mate; the neuro-surgeon, then got to tell me a bit about memory. I've forgotten most of it, something about growing old and having these senior moments. But I do recall him telling me that memory comes in two forms; long-term and short-term and that neither is much good. The thing that sticks in memory is that our short- term memory is feeble and our long- term memory is fictional, (read fictional as b…s..t a bit like the local that we had just encountered which I brought on the lecture that I was about to get.)
He went on to say that every second of every day we are swamped by trillions of bits of information like; the things we smell, what we hear or see. Most of it simply skips past the memory banks and heads straight for the great sea of nothingness. If it didn't, our heads would soon bulge out to one side and then burst. I must have met dozens of those blokes in my time, bigheads full of nothing. Sooo that explains why. I mean to say, who am I to argue with a neuro-surgeon. Apparently the short-term memory, even when it is in good condition, can only hang on to about half a dozen separate bits of stuff.
Immediately and permanently excluded from that half dozen are; in my case now, the name of the person I've just been introduced to and where I put my glasses. Back then it was; what the princess bride had asked me to do before I did anything else and the telephone number of that contractor from Tooborac who only ever had Riverina red-eyes to shear. But at least the short-term memory is honest. What little it hangs on to is, by and large pretty much right.
The long-term memory is a lot larger but a lot less honest. It works like an old shearer talking about the tallies that he shore the blokes he beat and the men he worked with. You know the stuff I mean. The more he tells it the better it gets You see what is happening is; It, the brain, modifies the past.  He explained it to me this way. Imagine you lived in the wilds of Canada and were attacked, as happens a lot in those parts, by a grizzly bear.
There are three basics things that you have to do. First and foremost you need a survival plan. Apparently, this does not include running, screaming, singing a hymn or kicking the bear in the merchandise. That sort of stuff only keeps the bear interested, especially the hymn-singing and messing in the family jewels area.
The thing to do is to lie very still and wait for the bear to get bored and go away.I'm not sure I could manage that but it comes naturally to bear hunters caught short.
You then need to move on to the second stage of the process which is to go to hospital for repairs.

The third and final stage is best part, telling people about your battle with the bear. After you have bored your family to bits the next place is generally on the board at smoko-time or around the grinder.
Because the event was so traumatic, your memory will have kept a vivid and pretty accurate record of it. So you corner your victim between the smoko basket and the teapot and start to tell him about it.
Halfway through your riveting life-and-death story, he glances over your shoulder, pretends he has to grind some gear for the next run, promises to be back to hear the rest of the story after he has finished. He never does come back and every time you see him he turns and walks the other way or if you share a pen with him he puts on his earphones for the whole run and keeps them on at the end of the run until you’ve disappeared to the smoko table.
You now have two choices. Either you accept that your clash with the grizzly was nothing startling. Or you need to tell it better. In order to tell it better you make the good bits better and get rid of the dull and boring bits. In other words, you turn it into a story. And at the same time you turn it into a new memory.

Because according to my mate the Neuro-surgeon, and who am I to argue with science,  the long-term memory works a lot like a computer program that keeps receiving updates from Billy Gates’ Microsoft Central.
Every time you tell a story, the memory deletes what actually happened and replaces it with your latest version of what happened. Eventually, there's none of the original program left and the truth and your story have had a parting of the ways.

Mr. Neuro-surgeon also told me that the memory, like me, doesn't like nasty things. So it discards them or softens them. For example we can remember feeling pain, but we can't actually remember the sensation of pain.
A mate of mine had a nasty car accident, he broke both his legs his pelvis and both arms. He had teeth missing and half his face had been peeled back. He was bandaged from head to his toes and in traction when I visited him hospital. He was in a bed next to a parachute jumper whose parachute had failed to open and he had survived because he landed in a cypress hedge that sort of cushioned his fall. Nevertheless his injuries were the same as my mates.  During the course of the conversation I asked what went through their minds before they crashed; they looked at each other and then looked at me with grins as wide as the hole in the bandages would allow and said  in unison; “Shiiiit, this is going to hurt.” To which we all had a huge laugh.
You see; they had remembered the time before the crash and what was going to happen but none of the sensations of the actual feelings of pain. And they were enjoying the telling of their thoughts because helped to fudge over the nasty bit. Now, all this seems to explain a lot of things that has puzzled me for a long time.                                                     
It explains why the princess brides are prepared to have a second child, this despite the pain and agony they have been through. It explains why shearers keep walking up to a pen of full of turks. It explains why the sun always shone when you were a kid. The apples were always sweeter and why we were smarter. It explains why men were real men then son. It explains the enormous importance we attach to stories. It even explains why we continue to be shearers.

"Shearing," a mate of mine once said, and he'd done a fair bit of it, "is only glamorous in retrospect."

But retrospect is all we've got, and it tells fibs. So we pack our gear and head off once more to the sheds like innocents.
And it explains the meaning of nostalgia. Today is just a jumble of information that is neither logical nor sensible. But 20 years from now, October 2008 will be the wonderland of yesterday when the weather was perfect, the sheep were quicker than ever before and you popped that best tally of yours, kids knew discipline, people knew their neighbours, everyone pulled together, the Melbourne Storm were invincible and petrol was so inexpensive they practically gave it away.

My mate Hartley once said in a whimsical moment "The past is a foreign country mate, they do things differently there."  The one thing that I’ve come to understand is that, it isn't and they don't. We've just rewritten it in our heads.