And now for something completely different: Some of my year 12 artworks, thoughts on my first ANZAC day service in 30 years, and another experience of forgetting recent events.

April 25th, 2015. I slept like a lamb last night, and woke to  a beautiful autumn day, with warm golden sunlight playing through the bush on the drive out to my home town of Lilydale. Autumn colours were beginning to emerge on the main road. We went to the annual ANZAC Day service at 11am in the Lilydale Memorial Hall (opened in 1955, according to a pass to the opening ceremony I found in some of my father's things). The service has usually been held at the Cenotaph since the 1990s, but it was cold this morning, and there was a photographic exhibition in the Hall.  The Memorial Hall is a beautiful Art Deco building on the main road, next to the school. We used to have lots of fun there as kids, with the hall being used for many community events - including dances, parties, fairs, and annual ANZAC day services. I went every year with my parents, often freezing in the then-unheated hall, and I haven't been since 1985, when I was in year 12. It's where I learnt ballroom dancing on school nights in primary school (the hall doubled as a gym for the school) and I remember at least one Slim Dusty concert there in the 1970s. We had a Bardenhagen family reunion there in 1988, to mark the centenary of the general store built in 1888. It was wonderful to return after so many years, and to see the names of my father, two of his brothers, their father, and their cousin, on the honour roll to mark the two world wars. Our family were lucky that none of them were injured in WWII, and that my great-grandfather Ludwig Bardenhagen returned from WWI.

During the service, the sun streamed through the north-facing windows and warmed the hall, which was packed with over 120 people. I recognised several folk, including my grade 5 teacher; a school-friend's mother; another's widowed father; and a woman who used to teach at Sunday school, who had a son my age, and a slightly older daughter.. My heart overflowed with joy to see them all again, it was so good, especially after my recent sense of time running out.  I'm going to go back for ANZAC Day every year from now on, and maybe to any fairs or other local events so I can reconnect with community where I grew up and lived for 18 years, plus almost every university holiday. I even put a choir together to do  Christmas carols when I was in year 12 (looking back, that was a little ambitious for an 18year-old, but it seemed to go down ok, and the choir sang well. Maybe that's one of the reasons someone at the school nominated me, successfully, for an Australia Day young citizen's award, announced in 1986, and collected by a childhood acquaintance because my family had no idea about the nomination and were cruising the south Pacific on Fairstar, "the fun ship"). I'm also planning to go out to stay at Mum's at least once a week, so I can help her sort through the things in our 3-bedroom family home, which is still cluttered with things from her mother's house after Grandma died in 1993.

I'm glad to see that my autobiographical memory is still intact after a couple of incidents today  where I was told something had happened and I didn't remember it at first, then it came back to me. It's not a verbal memory problem, it's almost what we would call an episodic memory problem, i.e., a loss of memory for certain episodes. I 'm sure I don't remember this being described in the literature on right temporal lobectomies (ATLs )or in histories given by any of our right ATL patients at St Vincent's, so it's odd to experience it happening to me right now. On reflection, I know that I discovered I'd forgotten at least one event today, but I can't remember what it was right now. The first time this happened that I can recall was when the boys told me I attended the school concert after my first craniotomies in 2013, and I couldn't remember it until I saw a photo of the auditorium. I'm starting to feel like a fascinating single case study in neuropsychology, and that's a rather strange thing to be. It's actually very weird.  I even looked up "episode memory loss after right ATL" when it first happened this year, but I didn't find anything. If any of you, my readers, have encountered this kind of thing in your neuropsychological patients, or in the literature, would you mind dropping me a line using the contact form on the right of this blog? If anyone is inspired to do some research on this, can I be a co-author? If you ask me nicely, and want to talk about it, I might even volunteer to be a single case study, though anonymity might be a bit of a problem.

I've downloaded photos of four paintings I did in HSC Art in year 12. Two of the paintings are at Mum's place, the other two are in our house. Ben doesn't particularly like them, but he never studied art at school, or art history, and sadly doesn't appreciate anything much after some of the French Impressionists. There's a brief description of each painting, and the tapestry, in the captions. At the time, several people said they didn't like the skies, I'd painted, and some boys commented that there'd never been any purple tennis courts, and never would be. I'm sure I saw some purple tennis courts on television somewhere in the past year or so. I only painted the tennis courts purple because the dreary clay courts in the photo I was painting from looked ugly. I was inspired to colour them as I did when the painting was nearly completed. It was the first work I started, and one of the last ones I finished.

Art was one of my favourite year 12 subjects (the others were Biology B, Social Psychology, and English Studies). I spent every spare lunch-break down in the Art room. Other lunch-breaks were spent in choir practice (the late William Pierce, church organist at St John's Anglican Church in Launceston, and music master at my school, was a fun choir master and lovely bloke).  My Art teacher, Annette Simmons, said I received the highest mark of any of her students until then,  when the final results (written exam and portfollio) came in. She encouraged me to continue painting after leaving school . I'd love to do it again soon. I have paintbrushes and acrylics ready here at home, so I just need to buy something to paint on. Imagine what I could have achieved if I'd kept doing it these last 30 years!

A view of the Scots College, Sydney, from the boarding house, based on a photo I took during the Royal School of Church Music Summer School in 1985. The Tasmanian HSC examiners reportedly said this was one of the best paintings they'd seen so far in 1985, and my school kept it on display for a couple of years

A windy day in Mackay, North Queensland, September 1981. Based on a photo taken on a family holiday (5-day rail trip from Brisbane to Cairns). The painting is slightly damaged in the upper left part of the sky . The white mark is where som paint peeled off, it's not a UFO. 

A tapestry based on a landscape by Hans Heysen. Started after my 16th birthday and completed many summer holidays later when I was 21. I'd been hoping for a red convertible for that birthday, so my mother knitted a little red convertible with a female passenger inside (Mum has a mischievour sense of humour)

Left: Based on a photo of the little creek and ti-trees behind Bardenhagen's petrol station and school bus building in Lilydale Tasmania. Right: based on a photo of a cliff on Sarah Island in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The island was used to house children in the old penal colony, and an arrow, signifying a convict, was painted on the cliff where a child fell to their death. One of the most tragic places I've ever visited, and that was before the 1996 massacre.