Dialogue: I'm staying alert for ... Oh, I forget

Yes, of course I've made a New Year's resolution. I have resolved not to get ... what do you call it? You know, the condition that makes you forget the words for things. I can think of few things which scare me more.

Words are like those chemistry lab models made out of balls and wobbly springs. Any word is the central atom in a molecule of meaning and memory.

Tug on it and with it comes a swag of other things - ideas, images, people, all bouncing around on their springs.

Or to change the image, a word is like the innards of a cow on a hook at the freezing works. Pull at those innards and they all come at once - the liver, the lungs, the spleen and intestines, all of them different and yet interconnected by spongy, slimy, unidentifiable matter. They are the workings of the cow just as words are the workings of a head.

I just opened the dictionary at random and hit "motherhood." For me right now motherhood means the hens in my garden. Two of them are roaming with a single chick to guard. The chick is the size of a pigeon and can probably fend for itself, but the cat keeps eyeing it from the undergrowth known as my lawn and the mother hens do sentry-go, reluctant to lower their heads to feed. One glimpse of the cat and they cluster round the chick and cackle. The cat keeps its sinuous distance.

When my black dog sought some fun by nuzzling the chick along until it was bailed up against the fence and squeaking piteously, the mother hens flew at the dog, leaping in frenzy to drive their claws into its flank, giving no thought to their own safety. The dog was more puzzled than wounded but it backed off and I rescued the chick and released it back to its mothers who took it solicitously away.

So that is motherhood. But dangling from the same word is my own mother. And who can begin to describe their own mother, or rather the unique complex of images that makes up the idea of their own mother, and a relationship as looped as the coils of the brain?

I see images of my mother standing in the domestic clothing of the early 1960s with her brood of four at her skirts, and her expression as attentive as a sentry's. In those days her hair was dark. But in 800 words I would not think to start unravelling that neurological mess. And if I did try, the picture I would build would be more of me than of her.

But there are other balls dangling off motherhood. There are frazzled mothers in supermarkets with infants who wheedle for stuff and who try to climb over the lip of the freezer and into the packets of mixed vegetables, or who are pinioned in the seat of the trolley and who wail. Their wail works on my head like a pain. It makes me boil with annoyance. I want it silenced. The mothers want it silenced, too, but out of love rather than fury.

And every image brings more images in an endless succession of connotations.

Guiltily I find that motherhood conjures the texture of Mrs Coghlin's skirt. Mrs Coghlin taught me at infant school. I cannot see her face but I can feel the ticklish brown of her thick skirt which I imagine to have been tweed. I ran to sink my face in it on the slightest pretext.

And with Mrs Coghlin comes Mrs Morris, the mother of my friend Mike. I had called Mike's younger brother pregnant. I did not know what pregnant meant but I knew it was rude. Keith Morris went home in tears, and when Mike and I arrived later all muddy and happy and in need of biscuits, Mrs Morris flew at me, driving her claws into my flank and banning me from the house for being bad.

That is what words do. They offer avenues into the head. More avenues branch off them, and lanes and paths and tracks which can grow overgrown with disuse until a word recalled takes the scythe to the foliage and the past opens up. The words and the head hold no straight lines, only the random concatenation of the atoms that make up a mind. And I am scared of losing them. Nominal aphasia, that's what it's called.

The nominal aphasic can no longer recall the words for simple things like fish or dagger. It is the disability I most dread. I expect the first sign is forgetting the term nominal aphasia. So every morning this year, the moment I wake I am going to check that I can remember it.