I studied psychology for a couple of years in my forties. The most enduring legacy of that period is the friendships. The snippets of things learnt, which flash before me now and then, are that period’s unexpected bonus.

“God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.”

J. M. Barrie’s assertion is more one of philosophy than psychology, and more of the 19th than the 21st century. But its bittersweet truth, which he artfully explored in Peter Pan, is lodged permanently in my mind.

Without memory – a condition known as retrograde amnesia – we are condemned to an eternal present, in which progress is impossible. A paradox of aspiring to ‘live in the now’ is that, were it literally possible, life would become a living death.

As I sit in Molly’s Café, in Kobe, where the toasted egg sandwiches are fresh, and the coffee is filtered, I glance across the street to a vintage clothing store, called Desperado. The owner is opening up, placing his wares on the sunny footpath.

I allow my mind to wander, and the gap is filled with memory.

***

The shop’s name sends me back, spontaneously, to a moment in a forgotten movie, called In America (2002).

In it, a 12-year-old Irish immigrant sings ‘Desperado’ at her school concert. It is 1980s New York. The girl is accompanied by a hardened nun, plodding through basic piano chords, which makes her sweet voice more vulnerable still.

Her parents are in the audience. The movie’s story thus far is of their dealing with the death of a son, and the challenge of a new country. They have become hardened to each other, through cruelty of circumstance.

As the performance progresses, the camera sweeps into the faces of Mum and Dad.

“Desperado. Come down from your fences, open the gate…

You better let somebody love you before it’s too late”

I saw that film, and young Sarah Bolger’s mesmeric star-turn, 23 years ago. Apparently, the scene went straight to my brain’s hard drive. Its meaning became part of me; how the nourishment between parent and child must travel both ways.

Swiftly, I leap to a moment in my own life; my own Mum and Dad.

***

The roses were sweet that summer of 2009.

It was a late-August afternoon, on the final day of my cycle around the Irish coast, which brought me past my family home. Having pedalled 2,000 kilometres without much drama, that last day brought a little poisoned relief. Speeding home down the mountain, a late-season wasp got tangled in the ear clasp of my helmet.

I feel it now. The excitement. The buzzing.

The back door was hanging open, and the dog was wandering about. Entering through the garage, I found Mum and Dad, relaxed and pottering, in the listless heat.

As a child I was obsessively afraid of stings, which resulted in every known colourful insect seeking me out. But since adulthood, I do not recall having ever been stung.

Until now.

Enjoying the drama, I entered the breakfast room patient-like; moaning. This animated my parents doubly – to celebrate my arrival, and to solve the affair of the wasp.

Dad began fiddling to open the helmet; Mum gathered ice from the freezer. Through the annoyance, we laughed at the luck of being struck down on the last furlong. Then we shared a cup of tea, which Dad called ‘the rosie’, as I recounted all I had seen.

That day is my last clear memory of my father being fully himself. He was lighthearted, witty, and capable.

In the coming winter his health began, imperceptibly at first, to decline. With accelerating pace, he lost motor skills, lost the art of conversation, lost his humour, became shorter-fused. They called it Multiple System Atrophy – which is to say they weren’t sure what it was.

Dad died two years after pulling that wasp sting from the back of my ear. When I recall him, I return to that day in August. And as time rolls on, that silly wasp has become fragrant.

***

Sipping a second coffee, the neural pathways leap from sting to The Sting. But was the memory sustained by something more underneath? Meditations on my father, perhaps? Or age? Or death?

Robert Redford’s passing got less recognition than I had hoped. A lot went down in his home state of Utah, in September 2025. I wanted that world to spend more time with Sundance, as he took his final leap into the great Unknown Canyon.

I was too young to consider Redford a heartthrob. His impact on me was more intellectual than visceral, which would surely have met his approval. He famously decried his good looks as a barrier to being seen. And he was right.

A while back, I dove deeply into the Nixon era, as an unsolved riddle in my American consciousness. I began by reading All the President’s Men, from the two Washington Post journalists whose diligent work broke open the scandal and brought down the Chief. Redford, a political citizen without political ambition, had bought the rights of Woodward and Bernstein’s book before it was published, and became the auteur of a remarkable film of the same name (1976).

Of course, he played the dashing, particular, Bob Woodward.

In a 2013 DVD release, Redford, a natural storyteller, looks back on what converted a simple procedural movie into a classic of American cinema. He explained the decision to show the meticulous art of great journalism: how leads follow leads, how dead-ends are necessary to the journey, how persistence eats pluck for lunch.

He noted how the decision to put such ephemera into the heart of the script was frowned upon by the suits, as it seemed to rob the movie of its momentum.

But he defended his position, because the truth is in the details.

I locked away this thought, and made it part of me. When I think of his ruddy, handsome face, I also remember that fine observation of the artist.

***

It has begun to rain heavily, and the owner of Desperado is rolling out the awning. Molly’s Café has recruited a troop of opportunistic coffee drinkers, anxious to avoid the wet. They form an orderly queue; some stare distractedly out the window, others inspect their shoes.