When you get to my age, there’s a tendency for actual memories to metamorphose into mere shadows of their former selves.

Thus it is that I can remember what my earliest memory is, but now it’s an indirect recollection rather than something, the details of which I can still recall clearly at first hand, so to speak.

Anyway, since you ask, my earliest memory is of having my first haircut. I was, according to my mother, about eighteen months old at the time, so that would have put it in late 1953. I was born with a full head of hair (although I obviously don’t have any memory of that particular incident), so I imagine that after a year and a half I must have been getting a bit shaggy.

I was taken to the basement of the old Co-op department store and sat on a rocking horse while the deed was perpetrated on me. I screamed the place down throughout the entire hideous and traumatic ordeal, thereby establishing a pattern that persisted until well into my adult life, something I’ve written about before here.