No matter how much latitude you give someone, there are some social bad habits that are hard to forgive. Continually forgetting someone's name is one of them. There is nothing quite so obliquely insulting as forgetting who someone is: never being able to remember a person's name is to make that person feel unworthy of being remembered.
I am that social blunderer; the one who looks blank when someone I know I have met before comes up to greet me by name and I have no like response. Worse, sometimes, I forget both face and name in double-whammy-damage, so that I'm not even sure if I have met someone before or not, and really have no clues to go on at all.
Over time, I have earned a terrible reputation for this. It takes, on average, about six meetings before I will remember a name, and sometimes more than that - by which time people usually no longer want to talk to me. How do I try to deal with it? Up to now, not well at all; more a complex charade of damage limitation.
If I'm out socially, I will try to take a friend aside and ask them to tell me the names of everyone they know there. Twice. As long as people don't move around too much, I can keep a fair short-term track on them. Usually, though, it's like playing virtual fish-in-the-pond; that old game where you try to match card with card; face with that name you've just been told for the second time.
Ironically, I know how annoying it is to be misnamed, since my own first name is daily mispelt and misprounced. I've had faxes and letters addressed to everyone from Rosetta to Roasteater, not to mention Marita, Movita, Ita, Rosario, Roisin, Ruth, and my favourite, Rose Eater. And when they do arrive with the first name correctly spelt, they sometimes come with the surname Sweetman. I would dearly love to know if my fellow journalist Rosita Sweetman (whom I have never met) is ever confused with me, since people have been confusing me with her for years.
For me, it's not just a case of not recognising people I have already met, but of often failing to recognise even the most familiar of faces. Years ago, I went to a reading from Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home at an Irish Centre in London. Before the reading started, the man beside me struck up a conversation about Irish literature; we chatted away for about 10 minutes, until the reading began.
"Did you enjoy your conversation with Gerry Adams?" Dermot asked afterwards. I knew who Gerry Adams was; I just didn't recognise him when he sat down beside me.
Writing the social diary for this newspaper on the odd occasion was like sending me to Outer Mongolia: who the hell were all these people swigging back drinks or milling around in theatre foyers? How on earth did anyone recognise even their own friends at these things, let alone people they didn't know personally? I would look around, and my eyes would instantly glaze over. I recognised nobody - be they ever-so-famous rock-stars, business folk, actors, models, professional liggers, or just about anybody who ever goes to opening nights. People always say you see the same faces at these things, but since I always forgot all those faces, at each new event I was equally stymied. The PR folk of Dublin cottoned on quite fast that I needed aid, and steered me round like protective guide dogs, barking names and introductions at me as appropriate.
Anyway, not long ago, after a particularly disastrous occasion when I found I could not remember the name of a colleague I have seen passing by on my floor for almost three years, I decided I had to stop reclining on my own dire laurels and to do something about it. I started by looking at the Web. I didn't know whether to be interested or horrified to read that my inability to remember faces is "a rare neurological disorder, Prosopagnosia, due to a fault in the temporal part of the brain. There is no remedy, but with time it is possible to learn how to use other cues to aid recognition, such as smell." Smell? Well, where exactly does one begin the ole-factory journey? I had an image of myself sniffing just-introduced strangers in Dublin pubs while they poured the contents of their glasses over me in protest.
So the smell route was a cul-de-sac. I learned that one of the reasons people find it hard to remember names is that names usually have no meaning, and so are stashed in a different room in your memory - one to which I obviously have no access key. What I wanted to find out was some kind of method of remembering that I could practise.
Louise Daly is a senior training consultant at Carr Communications, whose communications courses deal with this very problem. When Daly joined the company some five years ago, she was reminded by director Terry Prone, on her way in to take her first training session, that it was not company policy to wear name-badges. "So I said I'd take a list of names with me, and that wasn't on either. Nor was the option of making a map of where people were sitting. I was terrible at remembering names, really bad. There were 12 people in there, and I asked Terry how I was going to remember who they all were.
"She told me that we don't listen properly when people are introducing themselves. That if I picked people at random in the group and approached them that way, and to make some association then with them and something else - like what they're wearing, or where they're from. Then to repeat their name in your head, and say it to them out loud - there are lots of ways of doing it: oh so you're Anne, is that Anne with an e or without?"
Daly did remember everyone's name, to predictable astonishment, and she has been successfully employing this method ever since. She talked me through it over the phone and that very night, I tried it out. It was a friend's birthday, and there was a good crowd gathered in the pub to celebrate - some of whom I knew I had not met before. This is the kind of scenario I am generally worst in. "This is Paul. You haven't met him before," Julie told me kindly, in the way you speak to the elderly infirm. Nor had I met Rory; before this night, I had always got Declan's name wrong; and never been able to remember who Roisin was.
But I tried hard this time, asking questions straightaway about each person, repeating their names in my head and then to the people themselves again, out loud. At the end of the evening, saying goodbye, I did actually remember these names. Paul looked at me in astonishment. "You remembered my name?" he said, "nobody ever remembers my name!" I don't know who was more pleased.
