At times I feel as though my life has been extraordinarily well-lived-in.

I’m not even that old in the grand scheme of things, and yet I find myself inundated by memories wherever I go. Thousands and thousands of memories – all of them significant in their own way.

Some of them are glorious, admittedly, however far too many others are excruciating. Does every human possess a heightened ability to recall moments of acute embarrassment and relive the indignity all over again as though it were yesterday, or is it just me?

Like the time I whispered, “I’m yours if you want me,” into the ear of a girl called Jenny while we were dancing at a local indie night. Years later I would ‘fess up and apologise for my creepy and rather cowardly attempt at a seduction. She told me that she couldn’t remember the incident and was hard of hearing in her right ear, meaning she almost certainly hadn’t heard a word of it. I have not seen Jenny since.

Then there was the time I did the double-handed ‘click and point’ gesture at two young ladies, accompanied with the words, “To be continued,” as I was leaving the room momentarily. Not only is this a criminally awful line, but I realised as soon as I’d uttered the words that I’d half-inched them from Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. In the film, Cruise’s character, a young doctor in NYC, discovers that his wife has committed a mental infidelity, and in act of insane jealousy and retribution, attempts to solicit a teenage prostitute, accidentally attends a pagan orgy and is tricked into believing that his actions have caused the death of a young female socialite. Yet at that moment I decided he was an appropriate role model.

Last night I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in 19 years. This really was a freak happening and a half, given it was at a jam night in a small village in rural Lancashire on a Monday evening, when normally I would have been 200 miles away at the other end of the country. And yet, rather than experiencing the sensation of unbridled joy at this wholly unanticipated occurrence of note, the first thing I thought of was the succession of increasingly humiliating things I said to her, or possibly wrote to her in emails, due to my perpetual shyness and resultant inability to ask her out. Shyness is nice but shyness can stop you from saying all the things in life you’d like to.

Eventually she tired of my confusing and wholly indecisive pursuit, plumping instead for a skinny lad who lived down the road from me, and disappeared without trace from my life. Sigh. She could have been the one*.

At the moment of our reacquaintance, almost two decades later, the first memories that had managed to maraud their way to mind were of my humiliations, my unconscious clearly not satisfied that I’d suffered sufficiently for the experiences the first time around.

Sometimes the brain is the enemy. The art is knowing when not to listen to it, without accidentally switching it off entirely, at which point one apparently starts spewing out spine-curdlingly cheesy pick-up lines or channelling a sex-crazed Manhattan physician.

We cannot always bolt the gate to the memory banks, but we should do our utmost to give the finger to the unwanted memories that so often make it out of the blocks first. For what follows behind may well be a past that delights rather than disquiets, the revelation of hitherto forgotten realms and the resultant sensation that, however things may have felt at the time, they could still be life experiences worth cherishing.

*She probably wasn’t the one.