A NEW study has confirmed what many of us already knew to be true, that good memories are harder to keep hold of than bad ones.
It appears that dangerous or distressing experiences make a bigger impression on our brains than happy ones.
Makes sense, really. Evolutionarily speaking, it is better to remember the time you nearly got eaten by a lion (so you can avoid the same thing happening again) than the dozens of times you enjoyed a peaceful evening by the fire.
All of this, of course, is a bit of a bummer for modern man.

I can recall in minute detail the time I was sent out of the classroom at the age of six by the really quite frightening Miss Tickle; but ask me to describe what I did that summer holiday and I haven’t got a clue.
In order to commit good times to memory, therefore, they have to be unusual or eventful. It’s easier to remember an exciting holiday to somewhere new than what you did the fifth time you went to Barcelona.
This in part explains our increasing desire to photograph, video and/or write down the good things that happen to us. It helps to jog our memory of past events.
Thus this week sees me developing nearly 100 photos of our recent holiday to Austria, compiling a scrapbook of tickets, maps etc for The Princess and retelling the best moments to anyone who cares to listen (and some people who don’t).
Here, for the benefit of your idle perusal and, more importantly, my memory, are a couple of edited highlights:

Eating two mouthfuls of breakfast on the plane before having it snatched away again, owing to having to re-land at Manchester after a bird strike.

Salzburg in the rain. Buying Mozart umbrellas and riding round in a carriage, The Princess holding the reins.

The sun lingering on the top of the mountains of an evening, when the valley is shrouded in darkness.

Dashing to the window every time the train went past.

Heart-in-the-mouth moments on the swaying cable car, trees whizzing past hundreds of feet below.

The rather lovely coach driver, always quick to laugh, telling us bad jokes.

Driving up the Hochalpenstrasse (high alpine road), hairpin bend after hairpin bend, to view Austria’s highest mountain and Europe’s longest glacier (check out www.grossglockner.com).

Ahh.... memories.

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