This evening I went to Zoë’s for dinner. She lives with Poppy and two other friends, Trish and Owen, in a house close to the castle. While we waited to eat Zoë suggested we play a game. After discussing the options we settled on the memory game ‘When I went to market …’

For the unfamiliar, this game involves each player adding items to an imaginary shopping list. The list starts with something beginning with ‘A’ and new items are added in alphabetical order, but each player has to list from memory everything that’s already on the list before adding a new one. For example our list went like this:

‘I went to market and I bought an:
Avocado
Banjo
Curly cum cat
Didgeridoo’
And so on …

We had to pause the game midway through so Zoë could go to the loo. While she was out of the room I started to have a ticcing fit. Trish and Owen kept me safe even though they’d never helped me before. As usual I lost my speech briefly, but it returned at the same time as Zoë.

She came back to find me flapping about on the floor, listing items from the shopping list. Interestingly, despite fitting I could still remember every item, but because my tics love a list plenty of extras made it into the basket too. As you’d expect there were plenty of biscuits!