Is on a bend on a narrow country road full of potholes, and sharp flints which are paddled onto it by tractors from nearby fields.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come home to find a car parked lopsidedly outside the house and strangers drinking tea in our kitchen waiting for a breakdown vehicle. We’ve had a few road accidents as well, the last one being on 27 May 2020. A motorcyclist was swiped off his bike by a trailer which had swerved onto his side of the road whilst navigating the bend. The Hampshire Air Ambulance landed in the field next to our house.

The driver of the vehicle towing the trailer carried on, but later saw the error of his ways and went to a police station. He was prosecuted. Specialist police officers came to the scene to reconstruct who did what, at what speed etc, and to take photographic evidence. Four years later, I was contacted by a lawyer acting for the motorcyclist who was now suing the driver as he had sustained life changing injuries. Would I be prepared to provide them with a witness statement as to what I saw and heard on the day in question?

Well, I have difficulty remembering what I did last week, let alone what I heard and saw in the fleeting moment they both passed the house four years before. Of course, I said yes, and yes, I understood that I might be required to attend court and give evidence. What I found really difficult was trying to remember what I actually saw and heard myself as opposed to what extra information and thoughts I had accumulated from discussing it with my husband and daughter after the event.

In her book The Memory Illusion, Julia Shaw refers to this as source confusion i.e. misattributing information to our own memory or experience. She specifically talks about it in conjunction with confabulation (in which the event being remembered never actually took place) in the context of early childhood memories. It’s led to me querying my husband’s firm recollection of sitting on his grandmother’s knee with his Dinky car when he was three. Is he sure that he hasn’t seen a photo or been told a story as he was growing up? No, he’s certain it’s a memory. Apparently, the average age for a child to form a memory capable of being recalled in adulthood is 3.5 years, although the range can be anywhere between 2 and 5 years. I am struggling to find my first memory.

I’ve often thought that I would be a really bad witness. I don’t understand how that can be, because as artists, aren’t we supposed to be highly observant? Mind you I was never very good at the observation round in The Krypton Factor. Or do we just observe different things? I’m generally good at spotting when something is different, which probably means that my memory of how something was before is perhaps subconscious and is only triggered when I sense a difference. Who knows? All I know is that I can remember my 16 digit credit card number with no problem at all, which was handy when I went out on Saturday morning and accidentally left both of my bank cards at home, and had to set up Apple Pay manually so that I could put some petrol in the car to get home again.

Anyway, I have recently received an email from the lawyer informing me that the case has settled and that I will no longer be needed at trial. Result!